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Table of Contents
fighting words
Is Zimbabwe Now a Rogue State?
foreigners
Advanced Search
Our Ticket Out of Afghanistan
art
gabfest
The Undecider
The Frankenstein's Monster Stimulus Gabfest
books
history lesson
Lessons From the Gilded Age
Lincoln's Laws of War
change-o-meter
human nature
Moving Along
Tip of the Juiceberg
change-o-meter
jurisprudence
Fuzzy on the Details
Linked Out
change-o-meter
jurisprudence
Counterinsurgency
See No Evil
change-o-meter
jurisprudence
Trypartisan
There's a New Lawyer in Town
chatterbox
low concept
Our American Cousin Revisited
Roget in Love
corrections
low concept
Corrections
Rubbing Him the Right Way
culture gabfest
low concept
The Culture Gabfest, Enough Already Edition
Dick Cheney Remembers
culturebox
medical examiner
Lovers' Laments
Pregnant Pause
culturebox
medical examiner
Blessed Be the Newsmakers
In Your Eye, Jenny McCarthy
culturebox
medical examiner
A 21st-Century Sex Scandal
Growth Industry
dear prudence
moneybox
Distant Lover
This Isn't Your Grandfather's Recession
dispatches
moneybox
The Meaning of Monaco
More Gloom, Please
explainer
moneybox
Un-Guilty!
Declining Declinism
explainer
movies
When Sharks Don't Attack
Confessions of a Shopaholic
explainer
my goodness
What Can You Open With a Key to the City?
How To Help a Vet
explainer
other magazines
Why Do Americans Love Peanut Butter?
Are We Socialist?
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
1/104
poem
technology
"It Takes Particular Clicks"
Tech for America
politics
television
Stimulate First, Ask Questions Later
She's Got Legs
politics
television
Man of Steele
Futon Follies
politics
the big idea
Michelle Obama Steps Out
The Case for Bankers
politics
the chat room
Professor Obama's First Seminar
Courtroom Confidential
politics
the green lantern
Gang Signs
Is the Cryosphere Crying Wolf?
press box
the has-been
How To Speak Obama
Straight Change We Can Believe In
press box
the spectator
To Catch a War Criminal?
Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader
recycled
today's business press
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Unplugged
Gregg Walks on Big Money Talks
recycled
The Man Beneath the Hat
Geithner to the Rescue
recycled
today's papers
Doggie Bag
Obama Loses Third Cabinet Nominee
recycled
today's papers
Did He Start the Fire?
Congress Makes a Deal
recycled
today's papers
The Baseball Player as Android
Geithner Bombs Coming-Out Party
shopping
today's papers
Heated Debate
Obama Gets Tough on Republicans
slate v
today's papers
What Was I Thinking? Porn-Star Boyfriend
Obama Wants Bailout To Go Private
slate v
today's papers
Science News: Beware Everlasting Jellyfish!
"Put This Plan In Motion"
slate v
today's papers
The Worst Valentine's Movies
Senate Finally Gets Stimulated
slate v
tv club
Dear Prudence: 500-Pound Chocoholic
Friday Night Lights, Season 3
sports nut
webhead
Alex Rodriguez, Fallen Hero?
Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook
technology
Satellite Diss
2/104
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
art
The Undecider
Bonnard's changing place in modern art.
By Christopher Benfey
Wednesday, February 11, 2009, at 6:53 AM ET
Click here to read a slide-show essay about the mysterious late
work of Bonnard.
.
.
books
Lessons From the Gilded Age
What Social Darwinists didn't get about evolution.
By Adam Kirsch
Monday, February 9, 2009, at 6:53 AM ET
Appropriately for a book about the impact of Darwinism on 19thcentury American life, Banquet at Delmonico's has a
distinguished intellectual pedigree. In his best-seller The
Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand wrote a group biography of
the thinkers and teachers who made Pragmatism the quasiofficial philosophy of post-Civil War America. That book
proved what Darwin might have called its literary "fitness" by
winning the Pulitzer Prize; so it is only appropriate that now,
eight years later, it has produced a kind of offspring in Barry
Werth's new book.
Werth, too, is drawn to the Gilded Age, that ruthless forcinghouse of modern American capitalism, and to the apparently
recondite philosophical debates that helped form the character of
the age. His title refers to a once famous, now forgotten event
that might be considered the apotheosis of Social Darwinism in
America. On the evening of Nov. 8, 1882, some 200 of the
country's best and brightest gathered at Delmonico's restaurant,
at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street in New York City, to raise a
glass to Herbert Spencer, the philosopher who coined the phrase
"survival of the fittest" and transformed the theory of evolution
from a biological hypothesis into an all-powerful explanation of
human society, history, and psychology.
Spencer is little-read today, now that Social Darwinism—the
doctrine with which his name is always, though not quite fairly,
associated—looks less like the science of the future than the
ideological self-justification of a rapacious and racist society.
But that evening at Delmonico's, Spencer could be forgiven if he
imagined himself the most brilliant human being who had ever
walked the earth. As the querulous, sickly philosopher listened,
William Evarts—whose career included stints as attorney
general, secretary of state, and U.S. senator from New York—
announced that "in theology, in psychology, in natural science,
in the knowledge of individual man … we acknowledge your
labors as surpassing those of any of our kind." Carl Schurz, a
Civil War general and Republican reform politician, called
Spencer "one of the great teachers, not merely of a school, but of
civilized humanity." Henry Ward Beecher, celebrity pastor of
Brooklyn's Plymouth Church, confessed that Spencer's works
"have been meat and bread to me. … [I]f I had the fortune of a
millionaire, and I should pour all my gold at his feet, it would be
no sort of compensation compared with what I believe I owe
him."
It was, in short, one of those orgies of self-congratulation in
which the Victorians, in America as in England, so delighted.
Spencer believed that human society was inevitably progressing
toward a perfect future; as apes were to humans, so 19th-century
Anglo-American democracy was to the coming utopia. The
louder they sang his praises, the surer Spencer's admirers could
feel that they were on the cutting edge of history—that their
wealth, power, and racial privilege were not the fruits of luck or
exploitation but the marks of election.
This complacency was what made it possible for Beecher to
assure his congregants that they should not worry about workers
who earned just $1 a day: "Was not a dollar a day enough to buy
bread? Water costs nothing. … A family may live on good bread
and water in the morning, water and bread at midday, and good
bread and water at night." The well-heeled Brooklynites greeted
this homily with laughter, Werth reports, and surely they would
not have laughed less if they had known that Henry "Bread and
Water" Beecher, as labor leaders started to call him, earned
$1,000 per speech on the lecture circuit. Traditionally, a
Christian minister might be expected to remind his flock that the
poor in spirit are blessed, that it was harder for a rich man to go
to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
But a modern preacher, steeped in the doctrine of evolution,
could turn this message on its head: The rich and strong would
inherit the earth, while the meek went extinct.
The irony was that this complacency rested on a complete
misunderstanding of Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwinian
evolution is anti-teleological—a mindless process with no goal
or direction. Yes, evolution gave rise to complex animals like
human beings, but it would be a mistake to say that humans are
"higher" creatures than apes in any moral sense: All living things
are equally "successful" insofar as they manage to reproduce
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themselves. The whole thrust of Spencer's thought, on the other
hand, was that, in the words of his American disciple and
popularizer Edward Youmans, "life, mind, man, science, art,
language, morality, society, government, and institutions are
things that have undergone a gradual and continuous unfolding,
and can be explained in no other way but by a theory of growth
and derivation."
Oddly, Banquet at Delmonico's never really offers a clear
explanation of Spencer's views on social evolution and the ways
they differed from Darwin's understanding of biology. (Spencer
himself recognized the difference and even insisted on it: He
was always reminding people that he came up with his version
of evolution years before The Origin of Species appeared in
1859.) Werth is more interested in anecdotes than ideas, and he
devotes much more space to Spencer's rambling letters about his
health problems than to his philosophical work.
Yet this lingering confusion is also oddly appropriate, since, as
Werth shows, Gilded Age intellectuals themselves often used
terms like evolution and positivism with no clear sense of what
they really meant. As with so many intellectual buzzwords, from
transcendentalism to deconstruction, evolution was not so much
the name of an idea as a badge of identity. If you believed in it,
you were on the side of science and progress; if you attacked it,
you were superstitious or reactionary. Noah Porter, the president
of Yale, set off the nation's first battle over academic freedom
when he forbade a young professor from using Spencer's The
Study of Sociology as a textbook on the grounds that it was
"substantially atheistic."
All this, of course, has a weirdly contemporary feel. The kind of
opposition that the theory of evolution provoked in the 19th
century—passionate, personal, and wholly unscientific—it
continues to provoke today. The difference is that now, no Yale
president would be caught dead banning a book for being
atheistic. The whole religious, scientific, and intellectual
establishment is behind Darwinism now, and the only opposition
comes from the margins—from religious fundamentalists and
small-town school boards. Yet Werth's book reminds us that, in
the past, the "progressive" doctrine of Darwinism authorized a
very reactionary politics—culminating in the eugenics
movement and the forced sterilization of unfit mothers. It is
worth remembering that the most advanced members of society,
intellectually speaking, are not always the wisest or the best.
change-o-meter
Moving Along
The stimulus-bill drama winds down, and Obama gets most of what he wants.
By Chris Wilson
Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 4:38 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.
The domestic squabble between the White House and the two
chambers of Congress appears to be largely resolved with the
reconciliation of the House and Senate versions, finalized
yesterday afternoon. The 'Meter has jerked back and forth from
the tremors in that fight as Obama banked points for legislative
victories and lost them for the failure to attract Republicans. But
the fact remains that the bill, mostly intact, is headed for
passage. Combined with a few signs of warming from Russia,
today's score is a 50 on the Change-o-Meter.
As the New York Times notes, the hasty compromise between the
two versions of the stimulus produced something rare in
Washington: a final product with a lower price tag than either of
the two original versions at a mere $789 billion. (The House
passed an $820 billion bill, while the Senate ratcheted it up to
$838 billion.) Senate Republicans do not plan to try to delay the
final bill's passage, their leader said yesterday. If everything
holds together, Obama is likely to sign the bill into law within a
few days and has reportedly asked television networks to
consider carrying that signing in prime time.
All in all, Obama gets 40 points for this legislative victory.
While there is little evidence of a sea change in the way
Washington functions, the president got most of what he wanted
with relatively little public showing of bad blood between
Democrats.
Meanwhile, across the globe, Russia has acknowledged longdistance overtures from the new administration. The Russian
foreign minister said as much at a meeting of NGOs in Moscow.
Russia may even offer more aid to NATO in Afghanistan, the
same minister said. Ten points for tentative signs of easing
tensions. That will come in handy when Obama has to make his
first tough call on Afghanistan.
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.
change-o-meter
Fuzzy on the Details
The market frowns on a bailout short on specifics, but the stimulus bill throws
science a bone.
By Karen Shih
Wednesday, February 11, 2009, at 3:52 PM ET
4/104
The bailout plan and the stimulus package continue to dominate
the news. Sketchy details about the bailout frustrate Wall Street
while House and Senate leaders work to reach a compromise on
the stimulus. And as troubles at home plague the Obama team, a
Taliban attack in Kabul and new Israeli election results could
mean difficulties for the new administration abroad. Obama
scores a 20 on the Change-o-Meter today.
The administration's $2.5 trillion bailout plan, which Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled Tuesday, incited a major
nosedive on Wall Street. The Dow fell nearly 400 points, the
Nasdaq fell 67, and the S&P fell 43 points. Geithner was heavy
on rhetoric, lambasting the Bush administration's actions, but he
didn't do much to distinguish the new plan from the old. The key
elements of the bailout include providing funds to some major
financial institutions, creating a public-private partnership to buy
up bad assets, and helping banks provide more loans to both
consumers and businesses, Bloomberg reports. The plan includes
a $50 billion home foreclosure program, lacking in previous
bailout plans, which is a step in the right direction for struggling
homeowners. That's good for 20 points on the 'Meter, but 10 are
immediately revoked for lack of details.
The House and Senate furiously hammered out a compromise on
the stimulus package today, which is expected to arrive on
Obama's desk soon. One source of a few 'Meter points: The
package includes significant funding for scientific research.
Though scientists were disappointed that most of the funding
was for biomedical research rather than basic science, it's still
more money than the Bush administration provided for the
industry over the last couple of years. That earns Obama 10
points.
Beyond U.S. borders, things are just as turbulent. In
Afghanistan, Taliban suicide bombers and attackers killed more
than 20 people and injured 57 others, sending a message to
Obama that his dedication to the region will be strongly tested.
The attacks come just as special envoy Richard Holbrooke was
planning a visit to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Israeli election results show a shift toward the right,
which may mean less openness to negotiation regarding the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though Obama acted quickly in
appointing a special envoy to the region and had hoped to broker
peace rapidly, the centrist Kadima Party's apparent win may
mean little if it's forced to work in coalition with the right-wing
and ultranationalist parties.
change-o-meter
Counterinsurgency
The stimulus passes the Senate as Obama predicts stormy weather.
By Emily Lowe
Tuesday, February 10, 2009, at 5:29 PM ET
The times they are a-changin': Republicans are comparing
themselves to the Taliban while Democrats are putting
expedience ahead of extra spending. And the latest politician in
trouble for cheating on his taxes is not a Cabinet nominee. These
surprises aside, the Change-o-Meter earns points for the stimulus
package's relatively speedy progress toward passage as well as
some refreshing rhetoric from the president on the economy and
Afghanistan. But it gives back some of its gain for failing to
change the Bush administration's position on a case involving
state secrets. All told, the 'Meter comes in for a respectable 28
points today.
With the support of the two centrist senators from Maine and
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Senate version of the
stimulus package passed Tuesday afternoon. In order to fulfill
Obama's request that a bill be on his desk before Presidents Day,
the Senate and House will have to reconcile the significant
differences between their two legislative bundles. And they may
just do it: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has threatened to
postpone recess if the work isn't done by Monday. We give 15
points for this uncharacteristic expedience.
Meanwhile, a new $1.5 trillion bank bailout that Tim Geithner
announced this morning may not be gaining as much attention
because of bailout fatigue. But two cautious points are awarded
for provisions to insert a little more accountability this go-round.
A verdict on this bailout's success will take a little time, though
the market was not immediately pleased with what it saw.
In the rhetoric department, Obama returned Monday night from
hawking his stimulus package in downtrodden Elkhart, Ind., to
hold a press conference at the White House, where he addressed
issues ranging from the credit crisis to Iran to A-Rod's steroid
usage. Returning to his familiar campaign cadences, Obama
made no bones about the depths of the mess we're in.
Obama was candid in response to a question about Afghanistan
5/104
as well, admitting that the work the United States has yet to do
in Afghanistan is too immense to consider setting a withdrawal
deadline anytime soon. His response echoed Afghanistan envoy
Richard Holbrooke's declaration over the weekend that the
Afghanistan war will be "tougher" than Iraq has been. The
administration's refusal to sugar-coat earns 10 points. (An extra
point is given for now having a president that can use Scrabbleworthy words like bellicose on the fly in a press conference, not
to mention his pronunciation of "nuclear.")
And elsewhere in the Middle East, in response to Obama's
expressed hope for a "constructive dialogue" with Iran, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said this morning that his country
would welcome talks with the United States based on mutual
respect. So, 10 more points for even a minor twitch in the 30year staring contest with an incredibly volatile nation.
Liberal commentators and lawyers had hoped the Obama
administration would change the federal government's position
in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, in which five men who say
the United States tortured them abroad are suing the private
contractor that arranged the trips. The case was dismissed in
federal district court after the Bush administration said that the
subject matter of the suit is a state secret; on appeal yesterday,
the Obama administration took the same position. That's a 10point loss on the 'Meter.
measures that could deter oversight, but a creative plan for
private investment in the bailout bill wins a few points back. As
the Senate bill lurches toward a vote, the Change-o-Meter sits
at 20.
Obama may not have wanted a battle like this so soon. But he'll
probably win it—at least in the short term. A new Gallup poll
reports that 58 percent of respondents disapprove of the way
Republicans are playing their hand while only 42 percent
disapprove of the Democrats. As the Washington Post notes,
however, Republicans seem confident that their opposition to the
bill will bring political payoff in the future if the stimulus fails to
make a major dent in the recession. Still, Obama's last-minute
trip to Elkhart, Ind., to garner stimulus support in Republican
territory—Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar still hasn't decided how
he's going to vote—suggests he remains intent on trying to get
his bill passed with more than the bare minimum support. The
Change-o-Meter awards a few points for effort.
But the stimulus package isn't without its flaws. Such a massive
bill will have something for everyone to complain about. The
Change-o-Meter, for example, is particularly disappointed in its
lavish support for Head Start. As Douglas J. Besharov and
Douglas M. Call wrote in the New York Times yesterday, the
House version of the bill awards $2.1 billion to the largely
ineffective educational program for underprivileged children.
"For education spending in general, states are to get tens of
billions from Washington with Congress asking almost nothing
in the way of reforms," they wrote. One expects more from Mr.
Accountability.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, cautions that terms in the bill
to hurry spending will stymie efforts at oversight and
competition.
change-o-meter
Trypartisan
Obama takes to the road in an attempt to woo Republicans.
By Molly Redden
Monday, February 9, 2009, at 3:43 PM ET
Senate Democrats appear to have attracted enough
Republicans—three—to clear the 60 votes required to move the
stimulus bill along. But that hasn't stopped President Obama
from flying to an economically bereft town in Indiana to garner
support for the stimulus bill. As the parties man the battlements,
Obama and the Democrats still have public opinion on their side.
The Change-o-Meter takes a hit for some questionable
provisions in the House version of the stimulus bill and urgency
Obama's looming bank bailout, on the other hand, has a little
whiff of change. Unlike the Bush administration's neverimplemented bailout plan, which relied on the government to
buy up rotten assets, Obama's plan, which he'll announce
tomorrow, will reportedly incentivize private investors to buy
them up. For that, the administration gets 5 points, with more to
come if it actually works. Merrill Lynch did this over the
summer and shook off $31 billion in bad assets. With any luck,
investors will be as interested in the rest of the asset market.
In other news, Vice President Joe Biden's trip to Germany
sounds change-y ("It is time to press the reset button and to
revisit the many areas where we can and should be working
together with Russia," he said) without promising outright a shift
in U.S. missile-defense policy, which irked Russia during the
Bush years. Biden's high-profile involvement in Obama's
administration thus far reminds us of Cheney's, but since he's, er,
very different from Cheney, the Change-o-Meter will hold
steady.
6/104
chatterbox
Our American Cousin Revisited
Was the play that ended Lincoln's life any good?
By Timothy Noah
It's the hoariest sick joke in America: "Other than that, Mrs.
Lincoln, how did you like the play?" By now it isn't even a joke;
it's become a familiar way to complain that undue attention is
being given to some frivolous aspect of an otherwise grim and
urgent matter. But we've had a century and a half to ponder the
awful tragedy of Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater and its
effect on the post-Civil War Reconstruction, the presidency, and
the American character. Surely that interval is sufficiently decent
that we may now ask, in earnest: What sort of aesthetic
experience occupied the Great Emancipator's final hours?
A pretty terrible one. Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald
calls Our American Cousin a "creaky farce," which may be too
generous. Its British author, Tom Taylor, would later become
editor of Punch, but there's very little evidence in Our American
Cousin that he had a sense of humor, and by the early 20th
century Taylor would be widely excoriated as a hack. Even
Joseph Jefferson, who originated the title role, admitted the play
"possessed but little literary merit." In its day, however, Our
American Cousin was an enormous hit, having lasted five
consecutive months (a very long run in those days) when first
presented in New York. The play, which tells the story of a
"rough-spun, honest hearted" Yankee who voyages to England
to claim an inheritance, likely won its following by giving
Americans an opportunity to laugh at stereotypically doddering
English aristocrats while simultaneously giving Britons the
opportunity to laugh at stereotypically uncouth Americans. What
was it like to watch? To grasp that, you really have to read it,
something I did recently to commemorate the 200th anniversary
of Lincoln's birth. To spare you from doing the same, I provide
what is (as best I can tell) the only detailed synopsis available
anywhere.
Act I. The curtain rises on a drawing room in Tranchard Manor
as the servants gossip about the "most uncomfortable" financial
circumstances besetting the family. Beautiful young Florence
Tranchard, daughter to a baronet, is in love with Lt. Harry
Vernon of the Royal Navy, but she can't marry him until he rises
in rank. Florence rushes onstage, hoping the day's mail has
brought word that Harry's been assigned a ship. Instead, she has
a letter from her brother Ned, who is traveling in the United
States. Ned reports that in the wilds of Vermont he has "lately
come quite hap-hazard upon the other branch of our family,"
which two centuries earlier emigrated to the American colonies.
From these rustics Ned has learned the fate of his great-uncle
"old Mark Tranchard," who years earlier disinherited his
daughter for marrying against his wishes and angrily departed
England to seek out his American relations. Uncle Mark found
these Vermont Tranchards, Ned has now learned, "and died in
their house, leaving Asa, one of the sons, heir to his personal
property in England." Asa, Ned writes, is sailing for England "to
take possession" of Mark Tranchard's riches.
Asa arrives, refusing to give the butler his card and declaring
himself "the tallest gunner, the slickest dancer, and generally the
loudest critter" in the state of Vermont. (This is roughly the point
in the play where President and Mrs. Lincoln, entered their box
at Ford's Theater, having arrived 20 minutes late.) When lunch is
served, Asa complains there's "No mush," "No pork and beans,"
no "brandy, rum, gin and whiskey," etc. The Tranchards are
alternately horrified and amused by their bumpkin cousin.
Meanwhile, the villain of the piece makes his entrance: Richard
Coyle, agent of the estate, who, meeting privately with the
baronet, Sir Edward Tranchard, tells him he faces financial ruin
because of an unpaid loan held by Coyle. In truth, the loan was
long ago paid off by Sir Edward's late father, but Coyle has
hidden the evidence. Coyle proposes to remove the financial
encumbrance by marrying Sir Edward's daughter Florence, who
detests him. Sir Edward is scandalized but must consider it.
More comic business ensues between Asa and the butler, Mr.
Binny:
Binny. Will you take a baath before you dress?
Asa. Take a baath?
Binny. A baath.
Asa. I suppose you mean a bath. Wal, man, I
calkalate I ain't going to expose myself to the
shakes by getting into cold water in this cruel
cold climate of yours, so make tracks.
Binny. Make what?
Asa. Vamose!
Binny. Make vamose!
Asa. Absquatulate.
Binny. b—what sir?
7/104
Asa. Skedaddle.
As the curtain falls, bailiffs descend on Tranchard Manor.
"Florence," sighs Sir Edward, "I am lost."
Binny. Skedaddle?
Asa. Oh! get out.
The curtain falls as Asa, trying to figure out what the shower is
for, douses himself fully clothed.
Act II. The curtain rises on Mrs. Mountchessington, a guest at
Tranchard Manor, instructing her unmarried daughter Augusta to
"be attentive to this American savage" because his inheritance
makes him a good catch. Augusta's sister Georgina meanwhile
beguiles another wealthy prospect, an imbecilic peer named
Dundreary, by pretending to an invalid ("I'm so delicate").
Florence is approached by Coyle's clerk, Abel Murcott. Years
before, Murcott was Florence's tutor, but Sir Edward dismissed
him for making ungentlemanly advances. Now a remorsehaunted drunk, Murcott warns Florence that Coyle means to
marry her. Asa, who unbeknownst to Florence has been sleeping
on a window seat, emerges from behind the curtains and offers
to help. Murcott tells Florence and Asa that he found amid
Coyle's papers written proof that Florence's grandfather paid off
the loan that Sir Edward believes is his financial ruin.
Florence brings Asa to meet her beloved cousin Mary,
granddaughter to Asa's benefactor. Raised in penury, Mary
Meredith is a humble dairy maid. Rather than pity her, however,
Asa is smitten ("Wal, darn me if you ain't the first raal right
down useful gal I've seen on this side the pond"). Florence tells
Asa she hadn't the heart to tell Mary he'd been left her
grandfather's fortune. She also confesses to Asa her love for
Harry and complains that Dundreary has declined to use his
influence to get Harry a ship. Asa, however, gets Dundreary to
change his mind in exchange for a bottle of hair dye.
Asa. Now, look here, you get the lieutenant a
ship and I'll give you the bottle. It's a fine
swap.
Dundreary. What the devil is a swap?
Asa. Well, you give me the ship, and I'll give
you the bottle to boot.
Dundreary. What do I want of your boots? I
haven't got a ship about me.
Asa. You'd better make haste or your whiskers
will be changed again. They'll be a pea green
in about a minute.
Dundreary. Pea green! [Exits hastily.]
Act III. The curtain rises on the dairy, where Mary finds Asa
whittling: "It helps me keep my eyes off you, Miss Mary." Asa
confesses to Mary that he knew her grandfather in America and
that he bequeathed him his property. "Will you excuse my
lighting a cigar?" Asa asks and then improvises a new ending to
the story. Before he died, Asa says, old Mark Tranchard saw his
error in "hardening my heart against my own flesh and blood"
and asked for a candle. He then took the will and burned it. "Just
this way," Asa says, removing a paper from his pocket and
lighting it with his cigar. The paper is Mark Tranchard's will.
Later, Florence finds a fragment of the document Asa has
destroyed, and tells Mary, "It means that he is a true hero, and he
loves you, you little rogue."
Mrs. Mountchessington, meanwhile, is determined that Asa
marry her Augusta. "All I crave is affection," Augusta tells Asa.
Asa tells them both that Mark Tranchard left his fortune to
Mary, not him. Augusta abruptly calls him a "nasty beast," and
Mrs. Mountchessington tells Asa he is impertinent but that she
will excuse it because he doesn't know "the manners of good
society." Asa is outraged. "Well, I guess I know enough to turn
you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap."
(Here, in the Ford's Theater production, John Wilkes Booth
rather ham-handedly inserts into the text a bang, a crash, and the
words "Sic semper tyrannis." Pandemonium as the curtain falls.)
What you've read so far should make clear that President
Lincoln, whose literary gifts far exceeded Tom Taylor's, did not
die wondering how Our American Cousin would end. The
American bumpkin would set things straight for his aristocratic
relatives and win the hand of the virtuous milkmaid. For the sake
of completeness, though, here's what the Lincolns missed:
Asa asks Mary to marry him. She accepts. With Murcott, Asa
slips into Coyle's office, smashes open a cabinet with an ax, and
finds the paper that absolves Sir Edward of debt. Coyle
confronts them. Asa shows what he's found, then tells Coyle he
must not only let Sir Edward know he is free of this debt but also
pay off the baronet's other debts with "money that stuck to your
fingers naturally while passing through your hands." He also
tells Coyle he must apologize to Florence "for having the darned
impudence to propose for her hand." Finally, Coyle must resign
his stewardship of Tranchard Manor, installing Murcott in his
place. Murcott vows to "conquer the demon drink."
Coyle does as he's told, knowing the alternative is prison. A
jubilant Sir Edward grants Florence's hand in marriage to Harry,
and Mary's to Asa. Georgina marries Dundreary and Augusta
marries the man she dropped for Asa. Four of the servants pair
off and marry. Florence addresses the audience: "I am sure you
will not regret your kindness shown to Our American Cousin.
8/104
But don't go yet, pray—for Lord Dundreary has a word to say."
Dundreary sneezes. "That's the idea," he says, and the curtain
falls.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 27 with Stephen Metcalf, Jody
Rosen, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow
on the audio player below:
corrections
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by
clicking here.
Corrections
Friday, February 13, 2009, at 6:49 AM ET
In the Feb. 11 "Has-Been," Bruce Reed mistakenly stated that
Miguel Tejada lied to Congress about his own use of
performance-enhancing drugs. Tejada is accused of giving false
statements about a teammate's use of the drugs.
In the Feb. 10 "Politics," John Dickerson incorrectly wrote that
President Barack Obama said the hardest part of his job was
writing letters to the families of fallen service members. That
was not the case. Obama talked about signing such letters and
said they had brought the weight of his office home to him.
In the Feb. 7 "Moneybox," Daniel Gross misspelled the last
name of President Ronald Reagan.
In the Feb. 5 "Explainer," Nina Shen Rastogi originally
misidentified the time period during which the rhinoceroslike
Paraceratherium lived. It roamed the earth 20 million to 30
million years ago, not 45 million to 50 million years ago.
In the Feb. 9 "Fighting Words," Christopher Hitchens mistakenly
stated that Sebastiao Salgado is a goodwill ambassador for
UNESCO. He is a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF.
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, Enough Already
Edition
Listen to Slate's show about the week in culture.
By Stephen Metcalf, Jody Rosen, Dana Stevens, and Julia
Turner
Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com,
which includes a credit for one free audio book, here. (Audio
book of the week: John Updike's Rabbit, Run.)
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss A-Rod's
steroid use, Obama's proposed $500,000 salary cap for
executives of banks that take public funds, the "25 Random
Things About Me" frenzy on Facebook, and the Grammys.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Alex Rodriguez admits to ESPN's Peter Gammons that he used
steroids in the 2001-03 baseball seasons.
William Saletan's Slate piece on Alex Rodriguez and the
prevalence of steroid use in MLB.
Tim Marchman's argument, also in Slate, that nobody liked Alex
Rodriguez even before they found out about the steroids.
The official site of Jim Bouton, author of the tell-all baseball
memoir Ball Four: The Final Pitch.
The 2007 Katie Couric interview in which Alex Rodriguez
denied using steroids.
The New York Times reports Obama's plan to cap bank
executives' salaries.
The New York Times Style section details how bankers would
struggle to survive on a mere $500,000 a year.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times sides with Stephen on
Obama's bank bailout plan.
Time magazine's Claire Suddath writes about Facebook's "25
Things" craze.
Slate's Chris Wilson attempts to locate the originator of "25
Things."
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: Blossom Dearie (RIP) singing "Rhode Island Is
Famous for You."
Julia's pick: Twilight's unjustly overlooked teenage vampire
costume design.
Jody's pick: Australian TV comedy series Summer Heights High.
Stephen's pick: Frank Kermode's essay on Milton (and the 400th
anniversary of his birth) in the New York Review of Books.
9/104
You can e-mail us at [email protected].
Posted on Jan. 28 by Jacob Ganz at 11:13 a.m.
Posted on Feb. 11 by Jacob Ganz at 12:39 p.m.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 25 with Julia Turner, Dana
Stevens, and John Swansburg by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 26 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
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: Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories read by Boris
Karloff.)
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Barack
Obama's inauguration, Hua Hsu's Atlantic Monthly piece on the
end of white demographic dominance, Daniel Bergner's New
York Times Magazine piece on the vexing question of female
desire, and the death of author John Updike.
in the show:
The Obama inauguration page on Hulu.
Jon Stewart not quite taking down Beyoncé and the Obamas on
The Daily Show.
Hua Hsu's Atlantic article "The End of White America?"
Daniel Bergner's New York Times Magazine cover story "What
Do Women Want?"
Troy Patterson's Slate piece on the best of Updike, the worst of
Updike, and how they're related.
"The Full Glass," John Updike's final story, published in The
New Yorker in May 2008.
An October 2008 conversation between Updike and New York
Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus.
Poetry, letters, and art criticism by Updike, published in the New
York Review of Books.
You can also download the program here, or you
can subscribe 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. (Audiobooks of the week:
Winnie-the-Pooh and The Metaphysical Club.)
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss
the Golden Globe Awards (and awards-season
ennui), the long-delayed return of TV's pro-torture
hit 24, and the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious.
Here are links to some of the articles and other
items mentioned in the show:
A list of Golden Globe winners.
Video of acceptance speeches by Golden Globe
winners at NBC's Web site.
Jane Mayer's 2007 New Yorker profile of 24 creator
Joel Surnow.
Edward Wyatt's New York Times piece on how 24's
producers are changing the show to fit a new
political landscape.
The Notorious Web site.
Jon Caramanica's profile of Jamal Woolard,
Notorious' Biggie Smalls, in the New York Times.
Dana's pick: Expose on PBS.
John's pick: The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson.
Julia's pick: The HBO series True Blood (but mostly
its amazing, NSFW title sequence).
Julia's pick: "The Itch," Atul Gawande's article about how
scientists are mapping the brain-body connection in The New
Yorker.
Dana's pick: Graham Greene's novel Brighton Rock.
Stephen's pick: V.S. Naipaul's travel essay "The Return of Eva
Peron," from the book of the same name.
Posted on Jan. 14 by Jacob Ganz at 10:27 a.m.
Lovers' Laments
culturebox
Renaissance sonnets and the art of passionate excess.
10/104
By Robert Pinsky
Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 6:52 AM ET
VI. "How Many Paltry Foolish Painted
Things"
Courtship is often funny, and sometimes the people involved
know that—even when the stakes are high. Courtship is also a
power contest with established boundaries: To be courted is to
be cast into a passive role. And as its very name suggests,
courtship invokes the assertion (or affectation) of courtly
manners: elaborate ways of behaving and loving—or writing—
meant to seem fit for royalty.
How many paltry foolish painted things,
That now in coaches trouble every street,
Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings,
Ere they be well wrapped in their windingsheet!
Where I to thee eternity shall give,
When nothing else remaineth of these days,
And queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.
Virgins and matrons, reading these my
rhymes,
Shall be so much delighted with thy story
That they shall grieve they lived not in these
times,
To have seen thee, their sex's only glory:
***So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng,
***Still to survive in my immortal song.
Poetry—and, for speakers of English, Shakespeare's poetry in
particular—is part of love's social life, supplying the words in
courtship's tangled but deeply imbedded web of behaviors and
feelings. Much of the vocabulary of love still deployed today,
whether in passion or in parody, in song lyrics or in movies,
comes from poems written in a single decade at the end of the
16th century.
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets as part of a literary vogue, the
great sonnet fad of the 1590s. Inspired by Sir Philip Sidney's
sequence "Astrophil and Stella" (itself based on the Italian
sonnets of Petrarch and popularized via early, Napster-like
piracy), English poets and booksellers of that decade produced
hundreds of sonnet sequences. The product in each case was a
series of witty, hyperbolic 14-line love poems, addressed to a
lady who, in theory, would be flattered and won by the poet's
elaborate, inventive descriptions of her tremendous beauty, her
cruel resistance, and the agony she inflicted on the author. She
tortures him with her beauty and coldness, he says; and yet his
praises, and his clever descriptions of the pain she causes him,
will make her immortal.
The idea was seduction by flamboyant eloquence: the male
peacock tail of literary suffering. Behind the exquisitely
expressed pain of the lover was his flirtatious smile, and the
smile complimented his lover's mind as the exaggerated
suffering complimented her looks. The appealing balance of the
two helped give life to a body of enduring work. The sonnet fad
produced still-admired sequences like Samuel Daniel's "Delia,"
Michael Drayton's "Idea," Edmund Spenser's "Amoretti," and
Thomas Lodge's "Phyllis"—as well as more or less forgotten
efforts such as Barnabe Barnes' "Parthenope and Parthenophil"
and E.C.'s "Emaricdulfe."
For all the formulaic elements in these works, their authors
frequently achieved surprising things in the endless search for
ingenious new similes, zany puns, and outrageous metaphors: a
language show of seduction staged within narrow limits of form
and content.
Jaunty and passionate Michael Drayton (1563-1631), for
example, knew how to keep things lively in his sequence "Idea's
Mirror." Here are a couple of his sonnets:
Drayton the poet scorns and pities the women whom "no poet
sings," women so commonplace and bothersome that they
"trouble every street." He invites his yearned-for woman, Idea,
to feel celebrated by the comedy of this overblown disdain and
also by his eloquent attentions—which, he says (with equally
comic hyperbole), will place her in eternity such that queens
aspire to her leftover praises. "I exaggerate," Drayton all but tells
Idea, "in your honor and to amuse you."
Exaggeration, a charming and candid over-the-top quality, also
drives Drayton's description of Idea's power over him:
XXX. "Three Sorts of Serpents Do Resemble
Thee"
Three sorts of serpents do resemble thee:
That dangerous eye-killing cockatrice,
The enchanting siren, which doth so entice,
The weeping crocodile—these vile pernicious
three.
The basilisk his nature takes from thee,
Who for my life in secret wait dost lie,
And to my heart sendst poison from thine eye:
Thus do I feel the pain, the cause, yet cannot
see.
Fair-maid no more, but Mer-maid be thy
name,
Who with thy sweet alluring harmony
Hast played the thief, and stolen my heart from
me,
And like a tyrant makst my grief thy game:
***Thou crocodile, who when thou hast me
slain,
11/104
***Lamentst my death, with tears of thy
disdain.
Literally, this is a denunciation. But in the elegant courtship
game, it's actually a clever compliment to her understanding. He
isn't really slain, and she isn't really a monster, but those ways of
putting it are tokens of urbane playfulness and passion: a sexy
teasing. (The woman is notably generic—I believe Idea's eyes
change color in the course of the sequence, presumably as
Drayton ended one relationship and began another.)
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
***Those lovers scorn whom that love doth
possess?
***Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?
The extreme, blatant artificiality of the lover's extravagance
seems to be part of the pleasure these poems express or seek.
How preposterously, amusingly far one can go in speaking to the
moon or finding a new metaphor? A highway, for instance:
Sonnet LXXXIV. "Highway, Since You"
Samuel Daniel (1562-1620) uses two meanings of volume to
court his Delia with Homeric amplitude, with towers and
temples constructed within the little room of his sonnet:
Sonnet XLVII: "Read in My Face"
Read in my face a volume of despairs,
The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe,
Drawn with my blood and printed with my
cares
Wrought by her hand, that I have honor'd so.
Who, whilst I burn, she sings at my soul's
wrack,
Looking aloft from turret of her pride;
There my soul's tyrant joys her in the sack
Of her own seat, whereof I made her guide.
There do these smokes that from affliction
rise,
Serve as an incense to a cruel Dame;
A sacrifice thrice grateful to her eyes,
Because their power serve to exact the same.
***Thus ruins she, to satisfy her will,
***The Temple where her name was honor'd
still.
Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be,
And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet,
Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet
More oft than to a chamber melody;
Now, blessed you, bear onward blessed me
To her, where I my heart safe left shall meet;
My Muse and I must you of duty greet
With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully.
Be you still fair, honoured by public heed,
By no encroachment wronged, nor time forgot,
Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful
deed;
And that you know I envy you no lot
***Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss:
***Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may
kiss.
It's high time to introduce a poem by a woman. Lady Mary
Wortley Montague (1689-1762) wrote a century after the sonnet
vogue. Yet like Sidney, she composed a sonnet to the moon—
with an interesting difference of tone, more sympathetic to the
"coldness" of the virginal and "serenely sweet" moon:
"A Hymn to the Moon"
Philip Sidney (1554-86), who started the sonnet vogue without
intending to, has a gentler, less violent style in his exquisite
sonnet addressed to the moon:
XXXI. "With How Sad Steps"
With how sad steps, Oh Moon, thou climb'st
the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feels't a lover's case;
I read it in thy looks, thy languished grace,
To me that feel the like, thy state decries,
Then even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Thou silver deity of secret night,
***Direct my footsteps through the woodland
shade;
Thou conscious witness of unknown delight,
***The Lover's guardian, and the Muse's aid!
By thy pale beams I solitary rove,
***To thee my tender grief confide;
Serenely sweet you gild the silent grove,
***My friend, my goddess, and my guide.
E'en thee, fair queen, from thy amazing height,
***The charms of young Endymion drew;
Veil'd with the mantle of concealing night;
***With all thy greatness and thy coldness
too.
12/104
This attractive coldness is defined in a more personal way by
Montague's extraordinary poem "The Lover." Defining a less
artificial, unexaggerated ideal of love, she contrasts it with the
"vain affectation of wit"—a phrase that seems to allude directly,
and pointedly, to the excesses of the male sonnet tradition—in
the closing stanzas:
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all, and answered them
therefore:
Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere,
Importune me no more.
How many weeping eyes I made to pine in
woe,
How many sighing hearts I have no skill to
show,
Yet I the prouder grew, and answered them
therefore:
But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at
last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear;
Be banish'd afar both discretion and fear!
Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,
He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live,
And he may be rude, and yet I may forgive.
Then spake fair Venus' son, that proud
victorious boy,
And said, you dainty dame, since that you be
so coy,
I will so pluck your plumes that you shall say
no more:
And that my delight may be solidly fix'd,
Let the friend and the lover be handsomely
mix'd;
In whose tender bosom my soul may confide,
Whose kindness can soothe me, whose counsel
can guide.
From such a dear lover as I here describe,
No danger should fright me, no millions
should bribe;
But till this astonishing creature I know,
As I long have liv'd chaste, I will keep myself
so.
I never will share with the wanton coquette,
Or be caught by a vain affectation of wit.
The toasters and songsters may try all their art,
But never shall enter the pass of my heart.
I loathe the lewd rake, the dress'd fopling
despise:
Before such pursuers the nice virgin flies;
And as Ovid has sweetly in parable told,
We harden like trees, and like rivers grow
cold.
After reading a lot of sonnets of the period (even great ones),
there is a refreshing appeal to this loathing of the "lewd rake."
Montague's vision of mutual kindness over "champagne and
chicken" is charming partly because it is realistic.
Another woman poet—Queen Elizabeth I, though some scholars
doubt her authorship—lived during the sonnet vogue. She seems
to speak from the viewpoint of a woman weary of being wooed
as in the sonnets of male lovers—but then later in life regrets the
loss of those amorous complainers and their inventions. Cupid
punishes her with age:
When I was fair and young then favour graced
me.
When he had spake these words such change
grew in my breast
That neither night nor day I could take any
rest.
Then, lo! I did repent, that I had said before
The sonnet fad proliferated and spread like kudzu, leading Sir
John Davies (1569-1626) to compose a sequence of parodies he
called "Gulling Sonnets"—mocking the elaborate metaphors and
exaggerated suffering, the stylized cruel lady and importunate
writer. Davies' parodies are amusing, but it is not always easy to
tell them from the actual sonnets that are their target. After all,
the sonneteer, smirking as he says he is dying, conventionally
incorporates an element of parody into his poems.
In honor of that playful element of the sonnet vogue, I will close
with a game. Some of the unidentified poems below are from
Davies' "Gulling Sonnets." Others are actual, nongulling
examples of the form, taken from contemporaneous sequences
by great and well-known poets. As you read along, see whether
you can pick out who wrote what. (Answers are here.)
1.
O grammar rules, O now your virtue show;
So children still read you with aweful eyes,
As my young dove may, in your precepts wise,
Her grant to me by my own virtue know;
13/104
For late, with heart most high, with eyes most
low,
I craved the thing which ever she denies;
She, lightning Love displaying Venus's skies,
Lest once should not be heard, twice said, No,
No!
Sing then, my muse, now Io Paean sing;
Heav'ns envy not at my high triumphing,
But grammar's force with sweet success
confirm;
For grammar says—Oh this, dear Stella
weigh—
For grammar says—to grammar who says
nay?
That in one speech two negatives affirm.
Which I discharge to her perpetually,
Yet she thereof will never me acquite.
For now supposing I withhold her right
She hath distrained my heart to satisfy
The duty which I never did deny
And far away impounds it with despite:
I labour justly therefore to repleve
My heart which she unjustly doth impound
But quick conceit which now is love's high
Shreve
Returns it as eloigned, not to be found:
***Then which the law affords I only crave
***Her heart for mine in withernam to have.
5.
2.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to
dwell.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
***Lest the wise world should look into your
moan,
***And mock you with me after I am gone.
The sacred muse that first made love divine
Hath made him naked and without attire;
But I will clothe him with this pen of mine,
That all the world his fashion shall admire:
His hat of hope, his band of beauty fine,
His cloak of craft, his doublet of desire,
Greed, for a girdle, shall about him twine,
His points of pride, his codpiece of conceit,
His stockings of stern strife, his shirt of shame,
His garters of vain-glory gay and slight,
His pantofles of passion I will frame;
***Pumps of presumption shall adorn his feet,
***And socks of sullenness exceeding sweet.
3.
6.
The hardness of her heart and truth of mine
When the all-seeing eyes of heaven did see,
They straight concluded that by power divine
To other forms our hearts should turned be.
Then hers, as hard as flint, a flint became,
And mine, as true as steel, to steel was turned;
And then between our hearts sprang forth the
flame
Of kindest love, which unextinguished burned.
And long the sacred lamp of mutual love
Incessantly did burn in glory bright,
Until my folly did her fury move
To recompense my service with despite;
***And to put out with snuffers of her pride
***The lamp of love which else had never
died.
The lover under burthen of his mistress' love
Which like to Aetna did his heart oppress,
Did give such piteous groans that he did move
The heav'ns at length to pity his distress.
But for the Fates, in their high court above,
Forbade to make the grievous burden less,
The gracious powers did all conspire to prove
If miracle this mischief might redress.
Therefore, regarding that the load was such
As no man might with one man's might
sustain,
And that mild patience imported much
To him that should endure an endless pain,
***By their decree he soon transformed was
***Into a patient burden-bearing ass.
4.
My case is this, I love Zepheria bright,
Of her I hold my heart by fealty:
14/104
sidebar
Return to article
Quiz answers: No. 1, "O Grammar Rules," is Sonnet 63 in Sir
Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella." No. 5, "No Longer Mourn
for Me," is Sonnet 71 by William Shakespeare. All the rest are
from Davies' "Gulling Sonnets."
culturebox
Blessed Be the Newsmakers
A new business model for the press: Declare itself a religion.
By Stephen Bates
Now that newspapers have stopped generating profits, some
folks want to transform them into tax-deductible outfits that
chase after donations. Writing in the New York Times, David
Swensen and Michael Schmidt of Yale propose the university as
the model for a nonprofit press. Others, such as media
entrepreneur Steven Brill, recommend that newspapers charge a
small fee for online content.
If the press really wants to secure its future, here's a modest
proposal: It ought to declare itself a religion. The tax benefits, as
the accountants say, would be substantial—and there would be
other advantages, too.
As historian David Paul Nord notes, the nation's first reporters
were men of the cloth. Decades before the appearance in 1690 of
the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both
Forreign and Domestick, the typical sermon reviewed major
events of the week (news) and scrutinized them for hints of
God's will (editorials). Some clergy published their Sunday
sermons (newsmagazines) as well as books on current events.
Nothing can be "more proper for a Minister," proclaimed Cotton
Mather, than to record those "illustrious displays of that
Providence, wherewith our Lord Christ governs the world."
Then there's the legal conflict that keeps landing journalists
behind bars. Priest-penitent privilege is far sturdier than reportersource privilege.
Could the Times have transformed itself into a faith-based
organization and helped Judith Miller avoid jail in 2005?
Consider United States v. Judith H. Kuch, a federal case from
1968. Facing narcotics charges, Kuch called herself "Primate of
the Potomac" of the Neo-American Church, announced that LSD
was her sacrament, and advanced a religious-freedom defense.
The judge scoured the Neo-American faith—no spur-of-themoment Kuch concoction, it had been incorporated in California
three years earlier and claimed some 20,000 members—for the
customary marks of churchdom and concluded that it came up
short. There was no evidence of "a religious discipline, a ritual,
or tenets to guide one's daily existence." But the judge did find
troublesome stigmata of frivolity: The church symbol was a
three-eyed toad; its term for clergy was Boo-Hoos; one of its
hymns was "Puff, the Magic Dragon"; and—the judge seemed to
find this particularly significant—its motto was "Victory Over
Horseshit."
The Times is way ahead of the Boo-Hoos. It's got religious
discipline (just ask Jayson Blair) and rituals (attending an
editorial-board meeting). "Victory Over Horseshit" would be a
worthy motto for any paper, but "All the News That's Fit To
Print" could have come from Cotton Mather. As for "tenets to
guide one's daily existence," the Times ethics code bars some
reporters from wearing campaign buttons, seeking public office,
or participating in protest marches. This is citizenship celibacy.
Besides keeping its reporters out of jail, a church paper needn't
rely on massive infusions of foundation money. It could instruct
readers to tithe. As congregants, it would be their sacred duty.
More broadly, as New York University's Jay Rosen points out
(and noted earlier), American journalism itself constitutes a sort
of religion, "a belief system and meaning-making kit that is
shared across editorial cultures in mainstream newsrooms."
What qualifies as news reflects an idealized notion of
democracy. Public corruption brings forth righteous wrath from
the press's pulpit. Reporters strive to "evoke indignation at the
violation of social values," media scholars James S. Ettema and
Theodore L. Glasser observe in their book "Custodians of
Conscience"—as, they add, the prophet Jeremiah did.
Just as the Puritans vowed to purify the Church of England,
journalists seek to purify the country's institutions of selfgovernment. "Democracy," Philadelphia Evening Bulletin editor
Fred Fuller Shedd declared in 1931, "functions largely through
the efficient service of the newspaper"—no great leap from "No
one comes to the Father except through me." The Scripps
Newspapers' motto admonishes, "Give Light and the People Will
Find Their Own Way." See also John 8:12: "I am the light of the
world."
It shouldn't be that hard to reposition the press as a church. It's
already halfway there.
culturebox
A 21st-Century Sex Scandal
15/104
Would the mayor of Portland be out of office if he weren't gay?
By Taylor Clark
Here in the great evergreen-and-gray metropolis of Portland,
Ore., we like to think of our city as a thriving wonderland of
forward thinking. We prefer our urban planning carefully
considered, our light-rail and bicycle routes plentiful, our indie
musicians erudite and inscrutable, and our movie theaters
stocked with beer—progressive policies, all. So when we kicked
off 2009 by swearing in Sam Adams, as the first openly gay
mayor of a major American city, the occasion left a lot of us
pretty pleased with our nonchalant open-mindedness: "Oh, did
we just make civil rights history? Funny, we weren't even paying
attention." But the back-patting didn't last long. Within weeks of
taking office, Portland's new mayor found himself embroiled in
a scandal so lurid and combustible that it resembles a plotline
from The Young and the Restless. Which now leaves Portland as
an innovator of something quite different. The Adams imbroglio
may be the first true 21st-century political sex scandal: one that
only a gay politician could survive.
Our saga begins in September 2007, when the young and
wonkishly handsome Adams—a popular, ruthlessly effective
city councilor who seemed all-but-destined to win the following
year's mayoral race—faced a sudden, shocking threat to his
political career. Local real estate developer Bob Ball, also gay
and a political rival, had planted a rumor to end all rumors
within Portland's political set: Back in 2005, he alleged, the
then-42-year-old Adams had entered into a clandestine sexual
relationship with a 17-year-old legislative intern from Salem.
The teen's name? (Cue Y&R opening theme ...) Beau Breedlove.
When the charges hit, Adams handled the situation with Clintonesque political deftness, flipping the story line from that of a
shady relationship with a teenager to one of a role model seeking
only to counsel a young gay man. Of course they were friends,
Adams announced in a press conference, but it was a friendship
of mentor and protégé—in fact, he'd even gone to Breedlove's
18th birthday party to show his parents that one could be gay,
happy, and successful. Breedlove confirmed the story, and in
one swoop Adams vanquished a political adversary and
bolstered his own image. With an air of wounded nobility, he
told one local paper that such slander merely "plays in to the
worst deep-seated fears society has about gay men: You can't
trust them with your young." He won the mayor's race in a
landslide.
All was blissful in the Adams camp until last month, when Nigel
Jaquiss, a reporter for the alternative paper Willamette Week
(disclosure: and my former colleague), came calling. Jaquiss,
who famously uncovered another Portland mayor's underage sex
abuse, confronted Adams with evidence that he had lied about
his relationship with Breedlove—which may have included sex
while he was still a minor. The rattled Adams maintained his
innocence, but when it became clear that WW intended to
publish the story, he had no choice but to come clean. The day
after WW's revelation, Jan. 20, Adams hosted another press
conference, this time to admit that he'd never really mentored
Breedlove and that he had persuaded the teen to lie about their
romance—even asked political consultant Mark Wiener to teach
Breedlove how to speak to the media. (For the record: Yes, this
gay sex scandal features a Breedlove, a Ball, and a Wiener.) Yet
Adams also avowed that there had been no sexual contact before
Breedlove turned 18.
It actually took a day or two for all hell to break loose. Other
than the obligatory "Holy shit," many Portlanders seemed
confused about how to react. Everyone was disappointed, sure—
but was Adams' transgression actually criminal? (An
investigation into this question is pending.) Should they
condemn the lying, or do all politicians lie? I had friends call
me, infuriated, asking why this scurrilous gossip about a legal
private relationship merited a newspaper story at all, while
others told me Adams should resign immediately in disgrace.
Though seldom spoken aloud, a larger question hung over it all:
Is it different because he's gay?
When the public circus finally began, Portland made sure it was
of the full three-ring variety: protesters bearing signs saying
"Protect interns from our mayor" clashed with those pledging to
"Stand by our Sam"; newspapers (including the gay publication
Just Out) called for Adams' head while others admonished
Portland for freaking out; local retailers churned out novelty Tshirts and "Breedlove Cock" doughnuts. Hundreds of supporters
rallied for Adams at City Hall. Among the all-star cast speaking
on his behalf were gay musician Thomas Lauderdale of Pink
Martini, gay national sex columnist Dan Savage, gay Milk
director Gus Van Sant (who, bizarrely, sent a member of the
local Zoobomber bicycle clique in his stead), gay Massachusetts
Rep. Barney Frank (who weathered his own sex scandal in the
'80s and sent a message of support), and gay … you get the idea.
In the strangest turn yet, on the same day (Jan. 25) that
Breedlove revealed to the Oregonian that he and Adams had
kissed twice before he turned 18—including once for a full
minute in a City Hall bathroom—Adams announced he was
staying in office. And this is where things stand today, with
opponents pledging a recall drive (which, under local law, can't
start until July) and boosters preaching forgiveness.
So now, flush with details, we return to our central question: Is
this a political sex scandal that only a gay politician could
survive? Before I tread any farther down this path, I want to
make one thing perfectly clear: I'm not saying Adams' sexuality
makes his relationship with Breedlove or his subsequent lying
any more right or wrong. It just changes the way the scandal's
aftermath plays out, with the historically unique upshot that
Adams' homosexuality may end up being his saving grace. Of
course, that's not necessarily the way everyone sees it; most
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commentators have called Adams' sexual orientation completely
irrelevant. "This isn't a gay or straight issue at the core," one
prominent local gay rights advocate told Willamette Week, while
Adams himself claimed in his only scandal-related interview that
his conduct isn't a gay-people issue any more than a hetero sex
scandal would be a straight-people issue.
And to whom did Adams give that interview, you might ask? To
Out magazine, a gay publication, which undercuts his own
argument; saying sexual orientation is irrelevant to this case is
wishful thinking, not reality. (But who could blame LGBT
advocates for wanting to see it that way, after their historic
electoral triumph devolved into a gay rights nightmare?) Adams'
most prominent boosters, as we've seen, are gay. Many backers
are denouncing his opponents as homophobes or, in Dan
Savage's words, as "hysterical, terrified, sex-negative idiots."
(Although Savage also proclaimed in a 2008 column that "Gay
men in their thirties and forties who will date teenage boys are
almost always scum," so that one's a wash.) In a perfect world
we'd all be blind to sexual preference, but our world is far from
perfect. It's not a question of whether it's different because
Adams is gay; it's a question of how it's different—and how that
affects Adams' fate.
To demonstrate the first way it's different, let's ask the obvious
question: How would the Portland public react if Adams were
straight and Breedlove were a teenage girl? The answer is, we'd
see this as a garden variety, morally black-and-white sex
scandal, and Adams would be jobless faster than you can say
"McGreevey." After all, there's a massive double standard in
how we think about the age of consent. When an older man
courts a teenage girl, it's predatory and sleazy; but when it's a
teenage boy receiving advances, gay or straight, we have trouble
believing he's being wronged. (Indeed, Breedlove was
aggressively chasing Adams; he even has a dog named Lolita.)
Critics see the movie The Reader, wherein a 36-year-old Kate
Winslet beds a 15-year-old boy, and they speak of a "tender
sexual awakening," as every straight man in the theater
(including me) thinks, "I would have sold my siblings into
bonded labor to sleep with Kate Winslet when I was 15, you
little bastard." Portray a 36-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl,
though, and you're in … well, Lolita territory—no mercy there.
Some have argued that if Breedlove were female, straight men
would be high-fiving Adams, but this is preposterous. We'd
understand the attraction—and when you peruse Breedlove's
unbelievably porny Myspace pics, you can certainly see what
was on Adams' mind—but we wouldn't excuse the behavior.
"Yes, she's hot," we'd say, "but they call it jailbait for a reason.
You don't touch underage girls, period." The male-male
relationship brings a moral gray area that helps Adams.
And let's add another factor to this ethical calculus: For better or
worse, the under-40, hyper-liberal Portlanders who make up
Adams' support base automatically err toward nonjudgment
when it comes to gay culture. Essentially, the years of school
lessons on tolerance are coming to the fore; we were taught not
to judge the lifestyles of those who aren't like us, and we're not
inclined to start now. When you look out on the pro-Adams
crowds, there are the gay advocates who champion Adams out of
loyalty or out of fear over what's at stake, and there are the
gravy-train riders who worry about their interests losing support
if he leaves office, but you mostly see young, educated liberals
who feel unqualified to spit venom about Adams' sex life—
despite the fact that they'd be far less restrained with a straight
politician. (Even if you fervently disagree with them, it's hard
not to see this as progress in gay-straight relations.) Without
them giving Adams the benefit of the doubt, how big would
those rallies be?
For most Portlanders, though, Adams' lie is the crux of the
scandal—yet when we're honest, that lie isn't quite the same as a
straight politician's lie.
Let's put aside for the moment the question of whether he broke
any laws in his relationship with Breedlove (which looks
increasingly likely, since their restroom makeout probably
constitutes sexual contact). What are the political rules about
discussing sex? For hetero politicians, they're simple: When
asked about sex, just don't lie, and prepare to go down in flames
if you do. (See Edwards, John.) For gays, though—and not just
for public figures—these aren't the rules at all; society
encourages them to conceal their sex lives. It's not just that gays
had to hide their sexual orientation for much of recorded history,
it's that our public acceptance of homosexuality today is
somewhat conditional. Society doesn't want to see them kiss or
hold hands, and it doesn't want to think about what goes on
behind closed doors. Adams' lie was callous, orchestrated, and
self-serving, but at the same time, do we really expect him to
suddenly open up about sex after a lifetime of burying the
subject with the general public? Even a "no comment" would
have been suicide. This doesn't necessarily make the lie less
wrong—if anything, it makes the shrewd Adams look like a fool
for putting himself in such a questionable situation—but it's
another moral vagary that leans in his favor.
So far, these quirks of gay-straight perception have let Adams
cling to his job when a straight mayor would likely be holed up
in his basement with a case of cheap whiskey, but no one knows
how long this will last. One more damning revelation could sink
him tomorrow, but he could also ride out the storm and find the
public willing to forgive or forget—not least because no local
leaders appear eager to lead a recall push and risk the charges of
homophobia. Every morning on my way to the office, I now pass
a large sign that admonishes me in scrawled black letters to
"FORGIVE," but after a couple of weeks spent wading through
shrieking headlines and cultural conflict, you become less
inclined to think about forgiveness or indictment and more
inclined to think about how wrenchingly tragic the whole mess
is. As with President Obama, we elected Adams not for his
minority status but because he was the best man for the job, and
17/104
the hope we felt about our new, boundary-shattering leader
soured into the kind of scandal that could actually make the city
more intolerant and divided. Soon enough, we'll see how
progressive a city Portland truly is—and whether that will haunt
us in the years to come.
good thing, since my darling husband traditionally gives me a
bouquet of subway roses that are D.O.A. But if my beloved told
me that on Valentine's Day, instead of coming to see me, I could
schlep for 12 hours to try to get a few minutes of his attention
while he parties with his good (female) friend, then I might
decide to tell him there's someplace he can stick Cupid's arrow.
You two need to have a serious talk about where this
relationship is heading—if you can schedule it in between his
more pressing social engagements.
dear prudence
Distant Lover
A boyfriend who prefers to vacation with other women, and more Valentine's
Day quandaries.
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.)
Dear Prudie,
I've been in a long-distance relationship with a great guy for four
years; we see each other about twice a month. He has a wellpaying job, and I'm getting a professional degree. There have
been a few times when he has decided to stay home and party
with friends rather than come to see me. Last summer, he went
on a European vacation with a female friend. I didn't say very
much about the trip because their friendship is completely
platonic (though I wasn't excited about it). He might go on
another trip with her and has invited me, but the trips are always
when I'm teaching. Another female friend just invited him to go
on a group trip over Valentine's weekend. We had planned to be
together, but he's thinking of doing that instead. He invited me,
but it's a six-hour drive each way for me. He says he would be
OK with me going on similar trips because he trusts me. Am I
unreasonable for being jealous and wishing that he would opt
not to go?
—Peanut
Dear Peanut,
Your boyfriend sounds very thoughtful to include you on his
various journeys and social events. He must have sent you some
lovely postcards from his trip abroad, and I'm sure you will be
one of the first to get an invitation to his wedding when he
finally decides to settle down. Sure, I believe long-distance
relationships can work and that people can have close, platonic
friendships with members of the opposite sex. But it sounds like
what you have is a dwindling connection that perhaps keeps both
of you from having to make decisions about what you actually
want out of life. Maybe he can't be bothered to coordinate his
vacation schedule with yours specifically because it would crimp
his ability to take long trips with other women. You've been
involved but apart for four years, and you don't even mention
that you two are planning for the day when you can finally really
be together. I'm not a big believer in Valentine's Day, which is a
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: 500-Pound Chocoholic
Dear Prudie,
I am 25 years old, and I have been dating an amazing guy for
three months. He is thoughtful, kind, and intelligent, and I feel
fortunate to have him in my life. Here is the problem: He has let
me know (though not actually saying the exact words) that he is
in love with me, but while I like him very much, I am not quite
in that place yet. I have told him that when I say those words, I
want to really mean them. He has said that he appreciates my
honesty, but I can tell that he is getting impatient. He has even
set Valentine's Day as some sort of deadline, although I don't
think that being "in love" is a prerequisite for celebrating the day
together! It does not help that his engaged/married friends think
that our relationship is moving at a snail's pace. How can I get
him to see that, while I care about him very much, my emotions
will not conform to a deadline?
—Not in Love (Yet)
Dear Not,
Since he hasn't told you that he's in love with you, he must be
doing a lot of heavy hinting to have made his deadline clear. Has
he said something like, "There is a word that is a synonym for
'ardent feelings' that I expect you to express reciprocally to me
on Feb. 14, so that I am not embarrassed if I say it to you first"?
Ah, the romance! At three months into a relationship, there are
some people who know they've found the one; some people who
hope this may be the one but would like to see more Consumer
Reports-like long-term wear data before making a final
purchase; and still other people who think, Jeez, it's only been
three months. What's the rush? All of these are perfectly
reasonable ways to feel, and it's a bonus if both parties are in
sync. What isn't all right is for the guy you're dating and his
friends to tell you what you should be feeling, especially so soon
after coupling up. Of course, you can spend Valentine's Day
together without having it mean you've wrapped up the
Valentine's Day question for the rest of your lives. You need to
tell your beau that what you have so far is lovely, but a new
relationship is a delicate thing, and he's going to crush it by
applying too much pressure. If he can't back off and respect your
feelings, then he's given you a valuable insight into what he
thinks love is.
18/104
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I'm a 22-year-old senior at a liberal arts college. My parents and
I are not particularly close, but I know that they are proud of my
accomplishments, and we get along well. They are both are in
their 60s and are staunch New England Republicans with
traditional values. The problem is that I am gay. To my parents'
knowledge, I've never dated anyone. However, I have a
wonderful girlfriend with whom I am deeply in love, and I want
to be able to include her in family events, including my
upcoming graduation. I am worried about my father in
particular. When I'm at home, he and I often wind up watching
television together, and he occasionally makes homophobic
comments (about an obviously gay comedian, "I see another of
those people found a job"). I try to make it clear that I don't feel
the same way he does, but it also makes me terrified to tell him
the truth. My mother isn't much better—she pointedly stopped
watching Rosie O'Donnell's talk show after O'Donnell came out.
I just don't know what to do.
—Closeted Off-Campus
Dear Closeted,
It's hard to believe that at some point your parents haven't
wondered to each other why you have never indicated the
slightest interest in boys. If you don't have a warm and fuzzy
relationship with your parents, you do have a warm and
respectful one, and you should simply deliver the news that
you're not straight in a straightforward way. The next time you're
home, sit them down and explain that you've known for a long
time you're a lesbian, and you no longer want to keep this from
them. Since you say they are traditional New England
Republicans, this should mean you are not subject to geysers of
tears or rending of garments. Surely, at some level, this will be a
confirmation of what they've suspected. Add that you are happy
with your sexual orientation and, more than that, you are in love
with someone wonderful. This is a lot of information for them to
absorb, so let them ask whatever questions they have. As the
conversation continues, you can bring up the fact that you want
them to get to know your girlfriend and discuss what venue
would be best for doing this. Yes, they will have to adjust their
hopes and expectations, but let's hope that one of the adjustments
is to understand that one of "those" people is their beloved
daughter.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I've been visiting a local restaurant regularly for the past four
years. I met a waiter named "Brad" there, and we have always
gotten along great. I had a slight crush on him for the first year
or so and, as the years passed, my feelings grew. He has had
relationship problems in the past and has stopped dating. He told
me how attracted he is to me, but he hates the "dating ritual." So
for the past few months, we'd hang out occasionally outside the
restaurant. Then, out of nowhere, he told me that he didn't want
to date me—he wanted to marry me! I laughed it off, only to
find out he had planned an elaborate proposal. I know that I love
him, so I said yes. We've never even been on date, but we know
almost everything about each other because we've been friends
for so long. However, during a recent family outing, I told
everyone that we were engaged, and almost everyone was happy
for me, until they found out that we've never dated. Now they
are against it. I still plan to marry him. How should I handle this
without getting upset?
—Suddenly Engaged
Dear Suddenly,
I don't understand why your family should be upset. This is a
brilliant way to solve the wedding planning nightmare. Everyone
will show up during Brad's shift, the restaurant manager will
pronounce you waiter and wife, and instead of gifts, they'll all
chip in for a big tip. Maybe your family is concerned that if your
marriage follows the path of your courtship, your honeymoon is
going to take place in a rest room. Possibly they're worried that
you two will set up housekeeping in the cleaning supply closet.
It could be that they envision you giving birth at the cash
register. The way you should handle this is to say to Brad that
since it's Valentine's Day, you two should call off your
"engagement" and instead make plans to go out on your first
date. This should be followed by many, many more dates until
you figure out if you actually want to spend your life with him,
or if you prefer to tell him, "Just the check, please."
—Prudie
Photograph of Prudie by Teresa Castracane.
dispatches
The Meaning of Monaco
When one's trust fund implodes, there's no better place to run than a
gathering of the still-rich in Monte Carlo.
By Victoria Floethe
My small but helpful trust fund lost 40 percent all at once, and
then another 20 percent, leaving me, practically speaking,
destitute. I suddenly needed something more than an Internet
writing job (Internet writers need trust funds) at the exact
moment when there were no jobs. Either that or a man of means.
Part of the beauty of a trust fund has been the freedom to avoid
such a man, those incredibly rich but invariably dull hedge
19/104
funders and private equity guys, bean counters and bureaucrats,
so available in New York and urged on all single girls. But now
not only did I not have a meaningful trust; there was no longer a
surplus of boring young men with instant fortunes and tedious
hours at Blackstone or Goldman or Morgan Stanley.
That is how I recently found myself in Monaco, "a sunny place
for shady people," as Somerset Maugham described it.
His Serene Highness Prince Albert was hosting a conference,
meant to attract investors to the principality, to which my friend
Ian—a much too earnest and, I detected, slightly panicked
money manager—had been invited. Understanding my situation
(he had urged me to sell the WaMu shares that made up the last
40 percent of my holdings), he proposed that I come along as his
factotum and keep careful notes on every detail of every
conversation so that he could follow up knowledgably. "This is
an incredibly important group of people," said Ian.
The conference, attended by a few hundred men in Brioni suits,
was held in one of the prince's hotels. (He owns the choicest
ones in Monaco.) He arrived midway through the first night's
buffet dinner. Albert II is 50 and never married, though he has at
least two illegitimate children. Albert and his sisters Stephanie
and Caroline are "train wrecks with very good handlers," said
Ian, meaning it as a kind of compliment.
In fact, Albert did not seem in the least flamboyant or out of
control—he appeared to be shy and somewhat awkward. He
delivered a mumbled welcoming speech in a flat American
accent. The person next to me whispered that Albert had been a
camp counselor for many summers at Lake Winnipesaukee.
"Your highness," I said, when he took my hand, then I
involuntarily added something like a curtsey. He exchanged a
few words with Ian about London nightclubs and—this was
several weeks before he became a household word—a New
Yorker named Madoff. ("So the prince knew Madoff," I
marveled to Ian after Bernie's larceny was revealed. "Well, he
would, wouldn't he," Ian replied, unimpressed.)
"In what way?"
"They still have money."
Monaco is best remembered as it was portrayed in To Catch a
Thief, one of my favorite movies, in which a languorous Cary
Grant lives an idyllic life with the spoils of his former career as a
cat burglar and in which Monte Carlo is a place of scenic and
treacherous roads overlooking the Mediterranean. When Grace
Kelly's husband Prince Rainier (whose mother really did run off
with a jewel thief) came to power in 1949, the state coffers were
empty because the casinos, which then brought in 95 percent of
the national revenue, had been abandoned by the clients hit hard
by World War II. It was Rainier, aided by Aristotle Onassis'
aggressive backing, who rebuilt the economy by promoting
Monaco as a tax sanctuary and, otherwise, a safe and hospitable
place for the wealthy. It reached its height of glamour in the
1960s, when, in the fond recollection of Taki, the chronicler of
wealth's true hierarchies, Monaco was "not only Russian- and
vulgarian-free … but also looking like Ruritania-sur-mer rather
than Las Vegas-on-the-sea."
During the age of international deregulation and liquidity and
great public fortunes that began in the 1980s and continued for
two decades, Monaco's reputation suffered. As the world became
rich, Monaco chic-ness and élan fell on hard times—it became,
at best, a mail drop and, at worst, with its teetotal sheiks, a kind
of Riyadh on the Riviera (as boring as the desert one). Along
with its glut of bad condo developments, the two signpost events
of its decline have been the death of Princess Grace in 1982 and
the death of banker Edmond Safra in an arsonist's fire in 1999.
The latter was an event so unappealing and macabre that, after
many efforts to imbue Safra's death with a note of mystery and
glamour, Dominick Dunne was banned from writing about it in
Vanity Fair. Nobody was interested.
When Albert acceded to the throne after his father died in 2005,
he announced that he wanted to rid Monaco of its reputation as a
"pariah state" of money launderers and crooks by making its
banking more transparent. This conference was part of that effort
to emphasize the legitimate and positive aspects of Monaco's
role in the international finance community. And yet I had the
feeling something else was being said at levels my ears could not
necessarily register.
It was a lot of boring banker talk—two days of PowerPoint
presentations about capital flow and tax treatments and exchange
limitations—yet it was hard not to ask the question: With the
world's financial system collapsing, what, exactly, were these
men in their very good suits doing here? So I asked it.
"Well, not everyone loses their money in bad times," said a
tight-lipped Londoner, sitting next to me at luncheon.
"How so?" I pressed, thinking about my own devastated
accounts.
"They went into cash. Or have been in cash."
"And they would have been that smart, whereas the rest of us
were so dumb, because …?"
Mr. Cryptic elaborated, with what seemed like a little
braggadocio: "There are people who maintain high levels of
liquidity, because their main mission, after having gotten their
money, is not to lose it." That either sounded like a definition of
prudence or of a sub-rosa world of Bernies. If there was one
Bernie, there ought to be more—many, many more—with cash
to stash. To the point: Where was Bernie's dough?
20/104
Indeed, it was obviously more and more of an awkward
predicament to have money now when nobody else had it.
Escaping, on the second day, to lunch with Ian and a few other
Brionis at La Chèvre d'Or in the village of Eze way up in the
hills, it was hard to believe in the apocalypse looking over the
Cote D'Azur. But everybody agreed that the apocalypse was
real—and good news for Monte Carlo.
he thought, going to consolidate in a property up in the hills.
Had I ever seen To Catch a Thief? Well, right near where that
was filmed, he was buying a place.
"Do you like to be treated well?" he asked, putting an arm
around the back of my chair.
"Yes, please."
The point of Monaco, and its sister tax havens, was to be a
sanctuary for the rich in a world where the rich needed to hide
from the nonrich—from hungry tax and other legal authorities.
But just as being rich had become a common and banal state, so
had Monte Carlo. Except now, once more, with everybody going
broke, rich might become an exclusive condition.
I confess to a sudden sense of excitement. For so long, the
boring rich, so conventional and so predictable, have been the
Mr. Rights of our time—I don't have a girlfriend whose mother
hasn't urged her, all things being equal, to choose a hedge
funder. (My own mother, in Atlanta, seems to have had only one
thought since I arrived in New York.) But clearly, here I was
now in a roomful of Mr. Wrongs. (A further confession: Bernie
Madoff seems much more interesting to me as a crook than he
appears to have been as a pillar of the community.)
The world was turning: Having lots of money, rather than being
the natural state—something we've come to expect everyone to
have or be able to get—is an unnatural one. If you've got it,
there's something not too nice about you. Of course, that attracts
some girls.
I let my hair down for the gala dinner that the prince was
throwing for these new potential "investors" at the Hotel de Paris
and wore a white chiffon dress. In Daphne Du Maurier's novel
Rebecca, it was at the Hotel de Paris that the impoverished,
young, paid companion stayed with her employer, Mrs. Van
Hopper, before she met and married the wealthy and mysterious
Maxim de Winter. In the lobby was the echo of Mrs. Van
Hopper harrumphing, "Most girls would give their eyes for the
chance to see Monte."
Before dinner, as we mingled in the ballroom waiting for the
prince's arrival, I caught the attention of a smooth looker of
unclear provenance who now resides in Dubai, who seemed,
gratefully, to want to talk about anything other than money.
When I went to sit down, I discovered that the place cards had
been changed. I was no longer seated next to a man safely
accompanied by his wife, but to the smoothie—dark, slippery,
witty, and, no doubt, far from aboveboard—who, I felt deeply
pleased, my mother would definitely not approve of.
By way of further intimacy, he ticked off the locations of his
homes around the world, pointing out that now was not a time to
be spread too thin or too expansively. It was a time, he said, to
take one's profile down a notch or two. Didn't I agree? He was,
explainer
Un-Guilty!
Do corrupt judges get their decisions erased?
By Christopher Beam
Two Pennsylvania county judges stand accused of sending
thousands of teenagers to juvenile prison in exchange for $2.6
million in bribes from the privately run detention facilities. If
convicted, the judges could face up to seven years behind bars.
But what happens to everyone the allegedly corrupt judges have
sentenced over the years? Do they get their convictions
overturned?
It depends on the case. Juvenile advocacy groups and personal
injury lawyers are already preparing lawsuits to get the judges'
rulings reversed and/or win damages for their clients. Success
will depend on whether they can show that the original verdicts
were influenced by bribery or were otherwise tainted. For
example, many of the teenagers sentenced by the judges
supposedly waived their right to a lawyer, which could be a
violation of due process. The U.S. Constitution also guarantees
an "impartial jury" or tribunal. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court
has already appointed a senior judge to review every case that
the two judges heard during the period in which they allegedly
took money—about 5,000 hearings from 2003 to 2006. If that
judge determines that a sentence was unfair, he can order a new
hearing, petition to clear the youngster's record, or declare the
entire verdict void ab initio.
It's possible that the courts could throw out every verdict the
judges handed down during the period in question. In the early
1990s, a Philadelphia judge learned she had been implicated in a
union bribery scandal and agreed to become a government
informant. When various defense attorneys learned that the
judge had been wearing a wire, they appealed dozens of cases
and requested that all of her convictions be voided. Even though
the bribery scandal had nothing to do with the cases she was
hearing, they argued, her impartiality had been compromised
and her decisions were therefore tainted. The Pennsylvania
Supreme Court agreed, and everyone was granted a retrial.
21/104
Can the victims get monetary compensation? While the
teenagers and their families could get money from the judges'
alleged co-conspirators—the owners of the juvenile prisons—the
judges themselves won't have to pay up. Judges have absolute
immunity from monetary damages, per the 1980 Supreme Court
case Dennis v. Sparks. The rationale is that judges shouldn't be
worried about potential lawsuits when making decisions. But it
also protects them from having to pay up when they do
something illegal. That said, immunity is limited to "judicial
acts"—a judge could still be sued for something that he does
outside of his role in the courtroom.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Michael Cefalo of Cefalo and Associates,
Marsha Levick of the Juvenile Law Center, and Virginia Sloan
of the Constitution Project.
explainer
When Sharks Don't Attack
The science of shark repellants.
By Christopher Beam
An Australian navy diver was attacked in Sydney Harbor on
Thursday by a shark that partially severed his right hand.
According to an Australian defense spokeswoman, the diver,
Able Seaman Paul Degelder, was not wearing a shark-repelling
device at the time because the navy thought the waters were
safe. How do shark repellants work?
Shock treatment. Most modern shark-repelling devices are
battery-powered electronic units that clip onto divers' fins or
surfboards and emit electronic pulses that irritate the shark.
Sharks have sensory organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini—
tiny receptors clustered around the head that are hypersensitive
to electric fields. These help the shark detect nearby prey (as
well as mates) and facilitate navigation by functioning as a sort
of built-in compass. Shark-repelling gadgets are designed to
overwhelm the animal's receptors and drive them away—the
squaline equivalent of painfully loud music.
Several other shark repellants have been developed over the
years. During World War II, the military gave sailors a mixture
of copper acetate and black dye, which created a chemical cloud
in the water meant to smell like dead shark. It didn't work. In the
1970s, Eugenie Clark discovered that a fish found in the Red
Sea, the Moses sole, secretes a natural shark repellant.
Researchers later developed a synthetic version, but it worked
only when squirted directly into a shark's mouth—by which
point it's usually too late. Around 2004, a group of New Jersey
researchers created a liquid repellant derived from ground-up
shark but only tested it on relatively harmless species of shark.
Other shark protection technologies include chain mail designed
to obstruct shark bites and "bubble screens" that blow air
through a hose and, at least in theory, deter sharks.
So, do these repellants work? Hard to say, since testing them out
is so difficult. For one thing, there's a distinction between
deterring curious sharks and preventing an ambush-style attack
by a 2,000-pound great white traveling at 20 knots. It's easier to
create a test situation that replicates the former than the latter.
But, even then, it's extremely costly and time-consuming—you
have to rent a tank, bring in sharks, and prove that they're
physically repelled by the substance and not just bored.
Shock repellants have failed to prevent attacks on at least two
notable occasions. In 2003, a diver looking for scallops close to
the Australian coast turned off his electronic device once he
reached the sea floor and was killed. (A company representative
said he should have left it on for the entire dive.) In 2008, a
shark actually ate a repelling device during testing off the coast
of South Africa.
Bonus explainer: After the attack, Rear Admiral Nigel Coates
assured reporters that Able Seaman Paul Degelder was going to
be OK. What's with the weird navy titles? They're British. In the
17th century, the Royal Navy used the rank of "able seaman" to
distinguish sailors with more experience from "ordinary
seamen," who got paid less. The convention survived.
Nowadays, in the Canadian navy, able seamen is the secondlowest noncommissioned rank, between ordinary seaman and
leading seaman. (The U.S. Navy doesn't use the rank, opting
instead for plain old "seaman.") The title "rear admiral" dates at
least as far back as the 16th century, when rear admirals
commanded the rear portion of the British fleet and served as
deputies to the vice admirals. ("Vice vice admiral" doesn't have
the same ring to it.) The U.S. Navy uses the term for the position
between captain and vice admiral.
Explainer thanks Kim Holland of University of Hawaii; Chris
Lowe of California State University, Long Beach; Frank
Schwartz of University of North Carolina; and John Sherwood
of Naval History and Heritage Command.
explainer
What Can You Open With a Key to the
City?
Capt. Sully Sullenberger just got a key to New York. Can I call him if I lock
22/104
myself out?
By Juliet Lapidos
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg feted Capt. Chesley
"Sully" Sullenberger and his crew at City Hall on Monday. The
mayor also presented Sullenberger with a key to the city—a
token of thanks for successfully landing US Airways Flight 1549
in the Hudson River last month after a flock of birds disabled the
plane's engines. What does the key open?
Nothing. Made by Ashburns Engravers, Sully's gold-plated key
to the city is a replica of a key to City Hall from the early 19th
century. Although the original door still stands (at the back
entrance), the Ashburns replica key, which cost the city about
$100, won't turn the lock because at 5¾ inches in length, it's
actually smaller than the original. The police officers charged
with protecting City Hall keep the real keys, although the main
entrances generally remain unlocked, their function obviated by
the 24-hour guard.
The tradition of conferring upon heroes and luminaries a key to
the city dates back at least to medieval Europe. When a monarch
or other ruler came to visit a town in his dominion, the city
council would greet him at the gates and prepare a "joyous
entrance," with flowers, dancing, singing, and so forth. The
citizens would also present him with a key—probably a
functional one—as a gesture of obedience but also,
paradoxically, of autonomy. By offering a key, the citizens
demonstrate that they have not been forced to grant the monarch
entry and that they might have chosen not to. In medieval
Europe, there was also a related custom of giving certain
tradesmen preferred status so that they could enter a gated town
on commercial business without first paying a toll.
As the New York Times pointed out Monday, there's a local
tradition in New York of key-to-the-city recipients falling from
grace. Baseball players Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez
were both given keys (in June 2003 and August 2007
respectively), and both have since been accused of using
performance-enhancing drugs. At least New York never honored
a dictator. After donating several hundred thousand dollars to a
Detroit church in 1979, Saddam Hussein received a key to the
city.
Explainer thanks Paul Freedman of Yale University and Jason
Post of the New York City Mayor's Office.
explainer
Why Do Americans Love Peanut Butter?
They fell for it during World War II.
By Brian Palmer
Last week, Sen. Tom Harkin excoriated the company accused of
knowingly supplying salmonella-tainted peanut butter to a free
school lunch program, asking, "What's more sacred than peanut
butter?" How did peanut butter become such a popular part of
the American diet?
We can thank a vegetarian and a world war. Peanuts, which are
cheap and high in protein, have been consumed in the United
States for more than 250 years, but peanut butter wasn't
developed until the 1890s and didn't become popular until the
1920s, when it was first mass produced. The meat shortage
caused by World War II made the creamy spread an American
icon. By the mid-20th century, peanuts had transformed from a
slave food to a nuisance to a staple.
Peanuts were brought to the United States with African slaves in
the 1700s and were sold roasted in-shell by street vendors as
early as 1787. (Nineteenth-century ministers and theater owners
complained bitterly of crackling shells and messy remains in
their establishments.) During the Civil War, the invention of a
mechanized harvester drove down the already-low production
cost, and peanuts gained popularity among malnourished
Southerners. Confederate soldiers used peanuts to make pies, a
coffeelike beverage, and a chocolate substitute.
Confederates did not, however, make peanut butter. Although
grinding peanuts into a paste seems a relatively obvious
innovation, there is no clear reference to peanut butter in the
United States until physician, vegetarian, and breakfast-cereal
titan John Harvey Kellogg served nut butters to patients in his
sanitarium in the 1890s. Recognizing commercial potential,
Kellogg sold grinders to health-food stores. Within a decade,
producers began selling jarred peanut butter.
For 20 years, peanut butter remained an expensive niche food.
Teahouses sold peanut butter sandwiches as a trendy
accompaniment to their beverages. When commercial
production of peanut butter took off in the 1920s, the price
dropped. Its popularity increased when manufacturers learned to
add hydrogenated fat to prevent the oil from separating (a
process developed in 1922 by the founder of Skippy), but sales
really went through the roof as manufacturers added increasingly
stiff doses of sugar. World War II cemented the importance of
peanut butter in America, as the scarcity of meat required
citizens and soldiers to seek protein alternatives.
23/104
Legendary agriculturalist George Washington Carver's role in
peanut history, although significant, is sometimes overstated.
During a boll weevil infestation of the deep South in the 1910s
and 1920s, Carver urged cotton farmers to switch to peanuts, and
he recommended many uses for peanuts that he adapted from
other sources. But peanut butter was not among them. Carver's
promotional activities resulted in substantial Southern
cultivation of and increased demand for the crop, but Virginia
and the Carolinas were already prodigious peanut producers, and
few of Carver's peanut concoctions remain popular.
Mugabe did kill a lot of people in Matabeleland in the 1980s on
punitive expeditions inflicted by special units, trained by North
Korea, against an ethnic group not his own. And he has punished
recalcitrant voting districts by the indiscriminate denial of food
supplies. But this doesn't quite rise to the level of "genocide."
His soldiers may at one time have taken part in the opportunist
looting of the resources of Congo, but this doesn't exactly
qualify as invasion or occupation. Zimbabwe is not a harbor or
haven for wanted international terrorists, and it isn't a player in
the international WMD black market, either.
Were Carver alive today, he would have much work to do:
Demand could really use a boost. The USDA projects an annual
peanut surplus of 850,000 tons, and the salmonella outbreak
could push the surplus over 1 million tons. Many farmers may
have to accept government-backed loans of $355 per ton (less
than the cost of production) and hope that prices rise while they
store their unsold legumes in warehouses.
The situation has altered recently, however, and an examination
of what has altered may help us to clarify when a state crosses
the boundary from "failed" to "rogue." So great is the misery of
the Zimbabwean people that acute diseases like cholera are now
rife. And such is their degree of desperation that they have
started crossing the frontier en masse, chiefly in the direction of
South Africa, taking their maladies with them. This means that
Mugabe has made himself an international problem,
destabilizing his neighbors and thus giving them a direct
legitimate interest in (and a right to concern themselves with) the
restabilizing of Zimbabwe. If the voices of people like Desmond
Tutu and Graça Machel, who are beginning to insist that regional
action be taken to remove Mugabe, are ever heard properly, it
will probably be because Mugabe went too far in driving
infected people onto the territory of the countries next door. This
is germ warfare of a kind.
Explainer thanks Andrew F. Smith, author of Peanuts: The
Illustrious History of the Goober Pea, and Nathan B. Smith of
the University of Georgia.
fighting words
Is Zimbabwe Now a Rogue State?
And is it germ warfare when cholera sufferers are forced to cross international
boundaries?
By Christopher Hitchens
The situation in Zimbabwe has now reached the point where the
international community would be entirely justified in using
force to put Robert Mugabe under arrest and place him on trial.
Why do I say this now?
Mugabe's crimes were frightful enough before, to be sure. But
they were the crimes of an elected government, and it wasn't
absolutely clear that they exceeded the threshold at which
intervention can be justified or, rather, mandated. Essentially,
there are four such criteria. One is genocide, which, according to
the signatories of the Genocide Convention (the United States is
one), necessitates immediate action either to prevent or to punish
the perpetrators. Another is aggression against the sovereignty of
neighboring states, including occupation of their territory. A
third is hospitality for, or encouragement of, international
terrorist groups, and a fourth is violations of the
Nonproliferation Treaty or of U.N. resolutions governing
weapons of mass destruction.
Nor is it a detail that Mugabe clearly lost the last election in
Zimbabwe, in spite of being able to use the machinery of state as
if it were the private property of his own ruling party. The
overthrow of democratic rule in any country is something we are
quite entitled to consider as the possible prelude to extreme or
threatening measures against neighboring states. The European
Union, for example, will not admit any country that does not
have a functioning parliamentary democracy and would expel
any member that reverted to military rule (which is one ironic
reason why Turkey's Islamists are often such keen proEuropeans). There are those in the African Union who would
like to see a similar policy adopted, though it's a good bit further
off. The United Nations, of course, has to take its nations as they
come, even though Kofi Annan's "duty of care" concept did
slightly erode the previous emphasis on the "internal affairs" of
member states.
The dialectic between "rogue" and "failed" is not always easy to
measure. Iraq (which under Saddam Hussein was the only state
to have met all four of the criteria I mentioned above) became a
failed state as a consequence of becoming a rogue one and
thereby brought ruinous sanctions, isolation, and corruption on
itself. Afghanistan became a rogue state as a consequence of
being a failed one—often through no fault of its own—in which
international political gangsters could find a base. It was internal
"rogue" behavior that almost destroyed Rwanda as a country,
that sent vast numbers of refugees across its borders, and that
24/104
helped trigger the heartbreaking civil war in Congo that may
well by now have taken millions of lives. The disease that was
carried in that case was the plague of ethno-fascist tribalism of
which we now see the full harvest.
I once spent some time with Sebastiao Salgado, the UNICEF
special envoy for the eradication of polio.* By 2001, when we
visited Calcutta and other parts of Bengal, this horrible and
preventable illness was well on its way to joining smallpox as a
thing of the past. But if only a few pockets resist inoculation, the
malady, which is almost insanely infectious, comes roaring back
across wide swaths of neighboring territory. And in certain
militant Muslim areas, where it is believed that the inoculation is
a plot to make people sterile, the doctors and nurses of the
campaign have been shot as imperialist intruders. As a result,
polio is spreading again. Once more, it seems to me that this
could qualify the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of
Pakistan as having, to that extent, become an international
responsibility rather than just the concern of Pakistan alone. The
fact that the Taliban and al-Qaida spread from the same source
may not be entirely coincidental, which is why I offer the
thought that human rights and epidemiology may be natural
partners—and that Zimbabwe could make an excellent
laboratory in which to test the proposition that the two kinds of
health are related.
Correction, Feb. 9, 2009: The article originally misstated the
U.N. agency for which Sebastiao Salgado is a goodwill
ambassador. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
foreigners
Our Ticket Out of Afghanistan
The Afghan National Army is a powerful force for upward ability and national
stability.
By Anne Applebaum
President Obama wants to send 30,000 American soldiers; the
Germans have promised more money; the Poles have just taken
charge of a province; even the Dutch are thinking of keeping
some men on the ground. This is all very well, as long as
everyone realizes that the long-term solution to Afghanistan's
security doesn't lie in soldiers sent by Washington or Berlin but
in the ones who can already be found on a square of dusty desert
a half-hour's drive from Kabul.
This is the home of the Kabul Military Training Center, and it
doesn't look like much from outside. When I visited last autumn,
I saw simple barracks, a shooting range, and some classrooms
where a few students were learning to use computers. One of the
students—he'd learned excellent English during his family's 10-
year exile in Iran—told me he wanted to continue his studies in
the United States. (He was studying a vocabulary list: "confident
… routine … someday … accomplish.") He was an exception:
Most recruits are semiliterate, if they're literate at all. Many have
never slept on anything but a dirt floor before they arrive at the
training camp or under a roof made of anything but adobe and
straw.
But that, in a way, is an advantage. If nothing else, the Afghan
army is already a powerful force for upward mobility and,
ultimately, stability—which Western mentors on the ground
already know, though politicians back home seem not yet to
have noticed. Currently, the Afghan National Army consists of
80,000-plus soldiers. At any given moment, it houses about
5,000 recruits in the training center undergoing 10-to-16-week
courses. Recent innovations—an on-site bank that helps soldiers
send money home, a soccer field—have brought the onceastronomical number of deserters to a trickle. The coalition
forces eventually want the army to number 130,000. They
should be thinking even bigger: These men—not Americans,
NATO troops, or former warlords—represent the future security
of Afghanistan. "Success," in Afghanistan, more so than in Iraq,
largely depends on how fast and how well we can train them.
True, most of what goes on at the training center is pretty
basic—how to shoot, how to carry out commands. But they don't
object to fighting in principle, as many Iraqis did; they see the
army as a step up in life, which many Iraqis didn't. There are
"advanced" courses for officers. Potentially more important,
anyway, is what we would call the army's program of civic
education. Like it or not, the Afghan army instructors are in a
position to teach soldiers something that no other Afghan
institution has yet proved able to impart: national identity.
Generally speaking, if you want people to obey their country's
laws, it helps for them to feel some allegiance to the state that
has devised them. A powerful, admired, multiethnic army—
Tajiks, Hazars, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, and others—could help create
a more compelling, nonpartisan, civic Afghan identity, which
other citizens will also want to defend. Nation-building through
military service has been tried before—Turkey comes to mind—
and some of the time it works.
There are other reasons we should try harder to enlarge the
responsibilities of the Afghan army. The cacophony of
languages in Afghanistan, the complex ethnic structure, and the
harsh geography all have made Afghanistan notoriously difficult
to control for several centuries. Yet when Washington worked
through allies—with the mujahideen in the 1980s or the
Northern Alliance in 2001—we were far more successful. At the
moment, by contrast, the number of civilians killed by U.S.
military bombing grows exponentially from year to year, largely
because of confusion about what constitutes a Taliban meeting
and what constitutes a wedding. Those who know the languages
and culture are less likely to make fatal mistakes.
25/104
In an ideal world, of course, it would be far better if the Afghan
government were able to play the role of national unifier and if
Hamid Karzai had become a beloved, nonpartisan president. But
it hasn't, and he didn't. The government's bureaucrats are illprepared, often corrupt. Elected officials are rarely better. If we
use our new "surge" to improve the Afghan army, on the other
hand, expanding its role in the south and on the border, it could
eventually provide basic security in most of the country. It could
also create an institution that Afghans of all ethnic backgrounds
admire—assuming it doesn't turn authoritarian or corrupt in the
meantime. Still, it's not like we have a choice. The Afghan army
may not be our best ticket out of Afghanistan, but it's the only
one we've got.
gabfest
The Frankenstein's Monster Stimulus
Gabfest
Listen to Slate's review of the week in politics.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz
Listen to the Gabfest for Feb. 13 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Get your 14-day free trial of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com,
which includes a credit for one free audio book, here. This
week's suggestion for an Audible book comes from John. It's
the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, narrated by David Strathairn
and Richard Dreyfuss.
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week: The stimulus package passes, President Barack
Obama holds his first news conference, and the State Secrets Act
lives on.
in the show:
The group discussed whether more accidents occur on Friday the
13th. Back in 1998, Atul Gawande wrote a story for Slate looking
at studies on this phenomenon.
package at all. Emily says Obama won this round, but it was not
a great victory.
John says the debate over the stimulus package was not very
transparent, despite Obama's promise of open government.
Obama has managed to galvanize Republicans, who had felt
deflated by the November elections.
Obama held the first news conference of his presidency this
week. John says the president had hoped to convey a sense of
urgency about the economy, but his wonkish and sometimes
long-winded answers diluted the effect.
Lawyers for the administration this week urged a federal court to
throw out a lawsuit that accused an American contractor of
helping the CIA to fly terror suspects overseas to be tortured.
The lawyers took the same position argued by the Bush
administration last year: that national security would be
jeopardized if the case went forward. Emily says such blanket
arguments are sometimes used to disguise government
malfeasance rather than to protect government secrets.
David chatters about a photo gallery in Slate by Camilo Jose
Vergara that presents pictures of a statue of Abraham Lincoln
that has been on display for more than 80 years. The pictures
show how art can live on as part of a wider community.
Emily talks about a new book, Equal: Women Reshape
American Law. She says the first third of the book discusses
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's career as a young
litigator. Ginsburg was determined to make the courts think
about discrimination against women. Ginsburg is currently
recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer.
John chatters about reading a New York Times story and
realizing that blowing one's nose isn't as simple as it seems.
According to the story, when you have a cold, it's better either
not to blow your nose at all or to blow it gently, one nostril at a
time. John also talks about a Web photo essay that, he says,
brings home just how the current economic situation has ruined
lives and turned whole communities upside-down.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
[email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Feb. 13 by Dale Willman at 11:24 a.m.
Listen to the Gabfest for Feb. 6 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
The stimulus bill heads for a final vote in both houses of
Congress after more than 24 hours of bargaining. David says it's
a messy bill. Lefties find the package too small, while at least
some right-wing conservatives think there should be no stimulus
26/104
week's suggestion for an Audible book comes from David. It's
Robert Fagle's translation of Homer's Odyssey, read by Ian
McKellen.
This week, they discuss the state of the Obama administration
after its worst day so far, Tom Daschle's hasty retreat, and
William Kristol's exit from the New York Times' op-ed page.
in the show:
As Congress struggles to craft an economic stimulus package,
some Democrats are beginning to criticize the original House
plan as too costly. Some critics are blaming President Barack
Obama, but John points out that the bill was produced by the
Democrats in the House, not by Obama. David applauds the
careful deliberation; the 258-page House bill has a number of
things that could be removed. Among them is money targeted
for Filipino World War II veterans, an addition David says
makes the package smell like it's full of earmarks and special
dealing.
Conservative commentator William Kristol has ended his regular
column in the New York Times. Now the speculation begins on
who should replace Kristol, but Slate's Jack Shafer thinks the
answer is simple: no one.
David chatters about a lawsuit filed against artist Shepard Fairey
by the Associated Press. Fairey is the artist responsible for the
now-famous Obama "Hope" image. Fairey acknowledges that he
used an AP photograph as the basis of his work. The AP says it
owns the copyright and wants the artist to provide the
organization with credit and compensation for its use.
Emily talks about the health of Supreme Court Associate Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg has been hospitalized for
treatment of pancreatic cancer. She expects to be back on the
bench in a few weeks.
John chatters about the mystery surrounding a portrait that
appears to be of President Obama painted when he was in his
early 20s. So far, the White House has not commented on the
painting's authenticity. The back of the painting bears the
inscription, "Barack Obama (casual attire)."
Posted on Feb. 6 by Dale Willman at 11:55 a.m.
The group briefly discusses a Slate "Moneybox" piece by Daniel
Gross, in which he points out that Republicans are trying to take
what they consider a principled stand against the stimulus
package, claiming that government spending has never created a
job. David says it's important to understand Garrett Hardin's
economic theory, "the tragedy of the commons," and how it
relates to the current situation. There are some things the public
needs and government should provide, but Obama needs to
couch such spending proposals in terms of meeting the public
good—as things like the National Endowment for the Arts
already do.
Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle withdrew his
nomination to be secretary of health and human services this
week because of tax issues. Obama quickly accepted blame in
TV interviews, saying he screwed up in not recognizing how
such problems would be perceived by the public.
Daschle was not the only nominee to face problems this week.
Nancy Killefer also withdrew her nomination to be the
government's chief performance officer, because of a failure to
pay a relatively small amount of taxes for household help. There
are now tax-related questions concerning Rep. Hilda Solis,
Obama's nominee to head the Labor Department.
Jan. 30, 2009
Listen to the Gabfest for Jan. 30 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
week's suggestion for an Audible book comes from David. It's
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, read by
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
This week: the stimulus package, presidential drinking and
legislative civility, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration
Act.
in the show:
The financial stimulus package passed the House of
Representatives in a vote along party lines. David says that's
27/104
partly because the rump Republicans (those Republicans left
after the 2008 election) are more conservative than the
Republicans who lost their seats in November. The remaining
Republicans don't want to be associated with the stimulus bill.
Rather, they want to position themselves as fiscal conservatives.
Public opinion polls, meanwhile, indicate that the public wants
bipartisanship in Washington.
This week: surviving the inaugural crush, Obama's first week in
office, and sacrifice begins at home.
John talks about a visit by members of Congress to the White
House, where they were served appetizers and, more important,
alcohol. He wonders whether having drinks together will break
down some of the barriers between parties.
President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration
Act into law this week. The measure allows victims of pay
discrimination to file a complaint within 180 days of their last
paycheck, rather than within 180 days of their first unfair
paycheck. Emily says the measure is a thrilling development for
those concerned with employment discrimination.
Emily chatters about a Slate piece by David J. Morris, in which
he outlines why the United States should close the military's
torture school, known by the acronym SERE. Morris is a former
Marine officer who graduated from the SERE program.
David talks about how Pope Benedict XVI recently revoked the
excommunication of four bishops from a traditionalist sect. One
of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson, recently said that he
believes no more than 300,000 Jews died during World War II
and none of them in gas chambers.
John chatters about a provision in the House stimulus package
that would have prevented disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod
Blagojevich from spending any of the stimulus money that
would go to the state. The provision became moot after
Blagojevich was removed from office this week by the Illinois
state Senate.
Posted on Jan. 30 by Dale Willman at 11:25 a.m.
Jan. 23, 2009
Listen to the Gabfest for Jan. 23 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
which includes a credit for one free audio book, here.
in the show:
The group discusses their experiences in Washington, D.C.,
during Tuesday's inauguration. Emily spent time in the crowd
gathered near the Washington Monument. John had a better
vantage point from which to watch the ceremony—sitting on the
risers along the Capitol steps.
There has still been no official estimate of the number of people
gathered on the Mall. However, some people used satellite
pictures in an attempt to arrive at a number.
Some critics said Obama's speech didn't have enough soaring
rhetoric at a time of crisis. John says it's very difficult to say a
great deal in one speech.
The president quickly got down to business by issuing several
presidential directives. Among them were orders to begin the
process to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and to
restrict the methods available for interrogation of prisoners. He
also issued an executive order to freeze the pay of high-level
government officials and improve the ethics of the White House.
A vote of the full Senate has now been scheduled for Timothy
Geithner's nomination to be treasury secretary. On Wednesday,
Geithner told senators that he regretted the tax problems
revealed during his confirmation hearings.
David chatters about how a former Russian KGB officer turned
businessman has purchased the Evening Standard. The Standard
is London's largest regional newspaper.
Emily talks about how Michelle Obama dancing with her
husband made a wonderful statement for tall women around the
world. The first lady is more than 5 feet 10 inches tall and wore
heels, not flats, to the inaugural events.
John chatters about a quick reversal by Rep. Barney Frank, DMass. Frank had wanted a law that, among other things, required
any company that receives government bailout funds to sell off
its private aircraft and to remove all aircraft leases. Frank
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changed his mind when a fellow representative pointed out that
many of those aircraft were made in America.
[email protected] . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
South. But McClellan resisted. The man known as "Little
Napoleon" was one of the few Americans versed in the highly
idealized rules of war handed down by the professional armies
of 18th-century Europe. As McClellan saw it, the more
aggressive campaign that Lincoln urged would undermine the
European laws that had sought to make war resemble a kind of
gentleman's duel.
Posted on Jan. 23 by Dale Willman at 11:30 a.m.
history lesson
Lincoln's Laws of War
How he built the code that Bush attempted to destroy.
By John Fabian Witt
One of Abraham Lincoln's little-noted accomplishments has
become his most unlikely legacy. He helped create the modern
international rules that protect civilians, prevent torture, and
limit the horrors of combat, the body of law known as the laws
of war. Indeed, he was probably our most important law-of-war
president, having crafted the very rules that George W. Bush and
his Justice Department tried to destroy.
At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, few Americans had
given much thought to the laws of war. Lincoln was no
exception. He had never been a soldier of any note. In middle
age, he joked about his youthful service as a militia captain,
observing that although he had fought and bled in "a good many
bloody struggles," all his fights were with mosquitoes. As an
Illinois lawyer, his bustling commercial law practice did not
bring him into contact with the 19th-century laws of war, either.
When the shooting started at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861,
Lincoln became a war president barely a month into his first
term in office. As a novice commander in chief, his inclination
was to deny that the international laws of war had any relevance
to the South's war of rebellion. The rebels were criminals, he
insisted, not soldiers. Members of Congress and European
statesmen pressed him to take international law more seriously.
But Lincoln dismissed "the law of nations," as international law
was then called, as a curiosity that country lawyers like him
knew little about.
Lincoln's skepticism about the laws of war culminated a year
later, in July 1862, in one of the Civil War's most famous early
scenes. After weeks of deadly fighting and a demoralizing Union
retreat in Virginia, Lincoln traveled to the front lines to
encourage more aggressive action by Gen. George McClellan's
Army of the Potomac. To win the war, Lincoln was beginning to
think, the Union would have to attack the social fabric of the
Instead of embracing Lincoln's new urgency, McClellan lectured
Lincoln on the laws of civilized warfare and the sharp
constraints they placed on his prosecution of the Union war
effort. A war among Christian and civilized people, he told the
president, should not be a war against the people of the
rebellious states, but a war between armies. He warned against
the seizure of private property and especially against the
"forcible abolition of slavery." Civilized wars, in McClellan's
conception, left the fabric of society virtually untouched.
Lincoln grasped immediately that McClellan's conception of the
laws of war would make it virtually impossible to win the war
and preserve the Union. Just when a more aggressive war effort
was required, McClellan was advocating rules of engagement
that would have treated the South with kid gloves. At this same
time, Lincoln was encountering a series of excruciatingly
difficult problems that led him to reconsider his previous disdain
for laws of war. On the high seas, the powerful nations of
Europe demanded that the Union adopt a consistent set of
predictable rules in its treatment of vessels from neutral foreign
states. In the South, Jefferson Davis denounced Lincoln's
decision to execute Confederate commerce raiders as pirates and
threatened to retaliate in kind against captured Union soldiers.
And in the West, guerilla fighting among civilians on both sides
threatened to drag the conflict into a war of unremitting
slaughter and destruction.
Most of all, Lincoln's increasingly firm conviction that the war
needed to be brought home to the people of the South—and to
the slave system on which they depended—cried out for new
rules. After meeting with McClellan, Lincoln began to think
about what advantages new laws of war might offer the Union
effort.
The first stage of Lincoln's re-evaluation came in the
Emancipation Proclamation. Less than a week after meeting with
McClellan, Lincoln confided for the first time to members of his
Cabinet that he intended to issue his controversial emancipation
order. The proclamation was an utter rejection of McClellan's
limited war model. But as Lincoln later explained it, his new
view was that the laws of war authorized armies to do virtually
"all in their power to help themselves, or hurt the enemy."
Lincoln insisted that there were "a few things regarded as
barbarous or cruel" that were beyond the pale. But there could be
little doubt that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would
extend the war effort beyond the battlefield and into plantations
across the South.
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The second stage came that winter, soon after Lincoln finally
fired the slow-moving McClellan. After appalling casualties on
both sides at Antietam in September 1862 and in the midst of a
devastating defeat at Fredericksburg, Va., in early December,
Lincoln commissioned a new compilation of the rules for war.
Written by a committee of veteran Union officers led by a
professor at Columbia College named Francis Lieber, the code
aimed to update the laws of war for modern conditions. It would
enable the new, more aggressive war that Lincoln wanted to
wage in the spring campaigns of 1863 while preventing
aggressive modern warfare from sliding into total destruction.
powers agree to comply with them, and Lincoln's code seemed
to allow the great powers of the world to prosecute war
aggressively without descending into wars of total destruction.
Translations of the code spread through the armies of Prussia
and France and into multinational treaties signed at The Hague.
Following World War II, its provisions reappeared in the
Geneva Conventions that are in effect to this day. Eventually,
Lincoln's code would make its way into the pockets of men and
women stationed around the world, in the field manuals and
wallet cards that soldiers carry with guidelines for the laws of
armed conflict.
The code reduced the international laws of war into a simple
pamphlet for wide distribution to the amateur soldiers of the
Union army. It prohibited torture, poisons, wanton destruction,
and cruelty. It protected prisoners and forbade assassinations. It
announced a sharp distinction between soldiers and
noncombatants. And it forbade attacks motivated by revenge and
the infliction of suffering for its own sake. Most significantly,
the code sought to protect channels of communication between
warring armies. And it elevated the truce flag to a level of sacred
honor.
Yet if soldiers still today carry around a little bit of Old Abe
Lincoln in their pockets, the appeal of his approach to the laws
of war has waned in recent decades. Today, the two leading
paradigms for the laws of war are a humanitarian model and a
war crimes model. The former would base the laws of war in
individual human rights, the latter in the criminal tribunals like
the one at Nuremberg after World War II.
In the spring of 1863, Lincoln's code was given not just to the
armies of the Union but to the armies of the Confederacy. The
code set out the rules the Union would follow—and that the
Union would expect the South to follow, too. For the next two
years, prisoner-exchange negotiations relied on the code to set
the rules for identifying those who were entitled to prisoner-ofwar status. Trials of Southern guerilla fighters and other
violators of the laws of war leaned on the code's rules for
support. The Union war effort became far more aggressive than
it had been under McClellan's rules. As the Union's fierce Gen.
William Tecumseh Sherman put it, Lincoln brought the "hard
hand of war" to the population of the South. But this more
aggressive posture was not at odds with Lincoln's new code. It
was the code's fulfillment.
As the code's Confederate critics noticed immediately, the laws
of war Lincoln announced in 1863 were far tougher than the
humanitarian rules McClellan had demanded a year earlier. The
code allowed for the destruction of civilian property, the
bombardment of civilians in besieged cities, the starving of
noncombatants, and the emancipation of civilians' slaves. It
permitted executing prisoners in cases of necessity or as
retaliation. It condoned the summary executions of enemy
guerillas. And in its most open-ended provision, the code
authorized any measure necessary to secure the ends of war and
defend the country. "To save the country," the code declared, "is
paramount to all other considerations." Lincoln's code was a
body of rules not for McClellan's gentleman's war but for
Sherman's March to the Sea.
In the decades after the Civil War, Lincoln's rules went global.
International norms become international law only when great
In 1862 and 1863, Lincoln was up to something very different.
His personal passage from law-of-war skeptic to law-of-war
reviser in the midst of the Civil War offered him a distinctive
vantage point. His code sought to organize the laws of war not
around individual human rights or war crimes trials, but around
reciprocity and coordination between armies. Lincoln's code set
limits on his army's conduct, to be sure. But it also aimed to win
a war. The function of Lincoln's laws of war was thus to identify
and protect opportunities for cooperative behavior even in the
clash of armed conflict.
In our own time, Lincoln's pragmatic model of the laws of war
can help us in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little prospect of
reciprocity with terrorists, of course. But if one thing has
become apparent in the cross-border security threats of the 21st
century, it's that cooperation among the decent states of the
world will be indispensable to policing against common threats.
This is what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meant when she
stated in her confirmation hearings, "Today's security threats
cannot be addressed in isolation." Combating terror, according to
Clinton, requires "reaching out to both friends and adversaries,
to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones." Lincoln's laws of
war did just that. They were ways of reaching out to bolster
cooperation even in the midst of conflict.
For the past seven years, America has repeated the journey
Lincoln completed in 24 grueling months. Strong majorities of
Americans now call for the dismantling of detention facilities at
Guantanamo. Even stronger majorities oppose the use of torture
in interrogations. As a nation, we have walked in Lincoln's
footsteps, down an uncertain path from skepticism about the
laws of war to a rediscovery of their pragmatic mix of toughness
and humanity. President Obama, in his inaugural address,
pledged to reconcile our interests and our ideals. This is
precisely what Lincoln's laws of war sought to accomplish,
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rejecting lawlessness while relentlessly pursuing threats to our
way of life.
human nature
Tip of the Juiceberg
If A-Rod flunked a drug test, what else don't we know?
By William Saletan
Alex Rodriguez took steroids once in 2003 … right?
Actually, we don't know that. All we know is what Sports
Illustrated reported Saturday: that four sources say "Rodriguez's
name appears on a list of 104 players who tested positive for
performance-enhancing drugs" in 2003. According to Major
League Baseball, it's still just an "allegation."
But what's really unsettling about the report isn't that there's less
doping here than meets the eye. It's that for several reasons,
there's probably much, much more.
Let's look at the A-Rod iceberg from the top down. Start with the
part we can see above the water's surface: His name is on the list
of flunked players. As today's New York Times explains, "the
players had agreed to the 2003 tests under the condition that
their results would never be revealed."
How many other tests have been taken and flunked but, under
rules dictated by the players, never disclosed to the public?
Second: The Major League Baseball Players Association could
have destroyed the results—and is now being denounced by
baseball officials and pundits for not doing so.
Fifth: A drug test doesn't show when you started using the drug.
It shows when you got caught. How long was Rodriguez doping
before this test? Steroid evangelist Jose Canseco has already
alleged that he hooked up Rodriguez in the late 1990s with a
trainer who later indicated to Canseco that Rodriguez had begun
doping. SI's Tom Verducci lays out additional grounds for
suspicion, wondering how Rodriguez could be "so unlucky as to
be caught the first and only time he tried something." Verducci
asks:
Does it make any sense that somebody resisted
steroids for eight years in places such as
Seattle and Texas in the Wild West days when
there was no drug testing or public pressure
whatsoever, and then suddenly (and with the
security of a $252 million contract in his
pocket) choose to use them precisely when
drug testing and the public pressure are put in
place for the first time?
Sixth: The steroid for which Rodriguez tested positive was
Primobolan, a drug on which players allegedly relied to fool the
2003 drug tests. As SI explains, "Primobolan is detectable for a
shorter period of time than the steroid previously favored by
players, Deca-Durabolin."
If Rodriguez was using drugs calculated to evade detection, how
many other tests did he and others beat this way? How many
tests are they still beating?
Seventh: Three players reportedly told SI that the chief operating
officer of the players asociation tipped Rodriguez about a 2004
drug test that was supposed to be a surprise. Their allegation
echoes the 2007 Mitchell report. A tipped player can beat the
test by flushing the forbidden drugs from his system or using
other drugs to mask them.
How many times did Rodriguez and others escape detection
thanks to tips?
How many test results has the players association destroyed?
Third: These results ended up in the government's hands through
a bizarre series of legal flukes and errors.
How many other positive test results are still out there, unknown
to the government?
Fourth: The players association is asking courts to suppress the
list on which Rodriguez appeared and is threatening legal
consequences for anyone who even talks about it.
How many other lists have been obtained by the government but
successfully suppressed?
In fact: Did Rodriguez flunk the 2003 test precisely because its
results were never supposed to be disclosed—and therefore a tip
was thought to be unnecessary?
And while we're at it, SI's Selena Roberts astutely asks: Why
would the players association boss tip a clean player? Wouldn't
you tip the guy you suspect might otherwise flunk?
Eighth: As Tim Marchman points out in Slate, we're just now
finding out, six years later, about the 2003 test. We know
Rodriguez was using what was then a state-of-the-art drug for
evading detection.
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What are the chances that the state of the art hasn't advanced in
those six years? How many players are fooling today's tests?
When, if ever, will we find out about it?
Remember, none of this is conclusive evidence. These are just
questions. Maybe Rodriguez never doped until the testing
program began, and he was caught the first time he tried it.
Maybe he was tipped just that one time and just as an innocent
favor. Maybe it's pure coincidence that he chose Primobolan.
Maybe the state of the art hasn't advanced, and every player on
steroids is being caught. Maybe no other lists of failed test
results have been destroyed, concealed, or legally suppressed.
And if you believe that, I've got a $275 million slugger to sell
you.
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. Is it OK to pay for
kidneys? 2. The underworld of Middle East tunnels. 3. Body
parts made from trash.)
jurisprudence
Linked Out
A case that threatens the right of Web sites to link freely.
By Wendy Davis
Last April, startup real estate news site BlockShopper ran the
headline "New Jones Day Lawyer Spends $760K on Sheffield"
with a link to the bio for the lawyer in question—Jacob Tiedt—
from the Web site of his law firm, Jones Day. In July, it ran a
similar item about a home purchase by Dan Malone Jr., another
Jones Day lawyer, with the link to his Jones Day bio.
BlockShopper was following standard operating procedure by
linking to publicly available Web sites. But Jones Day got mad.
The law firm (a big one, at 2,300 lawyers) has never publicly
said why it sued; maybe the powers that be there thought the
posts compromised their lawyers' privacy. Housing records are
public documents, but the Web turns public into accessible, and
the firm presumably wasn't thrilled about having its attorneys'
home purchases broadcast. Jones Day demanded that
BlockShopper remove the items. When BlockShopper refused,
the firm sued the 15-staff startup for trademark infringement.
Jones Day's legal theory was that BlockShopper's link would
trick readers into thinking that Jones Day was affiliated with the
real estate site.
This may seem far-fetched, but the judge in the case didn't think
so, and that led to a settlement this week that will require
BlockShopper to change the way it creates links. And that's not a
good signal to send about the Web, where linking has been an
unrestricted currency available to all.
Trademark infringement is supposed to turn on consumer
confusion. For instance, if you set up a roadside coffee stand,
sell instant coffee, and market yourself as a Starbucks outpost,
you're probably infringing on Starbucks' trademark by tricking
people into thinking that you're the company.
The idea that readers of a real estate news site would somehow
be confused by links to Jones Day, on the other hand, shouldn't
have passed the straight-face test. One legal blogger proposed
that the attorneys who brought the suit take ethics classes. Paul
Alan Levy of Public Citizen described the lawsuit as a "new
entry in the contest for 'grossest abuse of trademark law to
suppress speech the plaintiff doesn't like.' " The digital rights
groups Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Citizen
Media Law Project, and Public Knowledge tried to file a friendof-the-court brief asking for the case to be dismissed.
No go. In November, federal district court Judge John Darrah
rejected the amicus brief and denied BlockShopper's motion to
dismiss the case before trial. Two months earlier, he had issued
an injunction requiring BlockShopper to remove the Jones Day
articles while the case was pending.
Faced with the prospect of big legal bills and an unfriendly
judge, BlockShopper co-founder Brian Timpone decided to
settle. On Tuesday, the real estate site said it agreed to change
how it links to Jones Day. BlockShopper will no longer use the
names of Jones Days attorneys as anchor text. Instead, it will use
the full and cumbersome URL. In other words, Timpone said,
instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write
"Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate." (The
agreement also calls on BlockShopper to say that the lawyer in
question is employed at Jones Day and that more information
about the attorney is on the firm's Web site.)
You can see why BlockShopper gave in: It's a little company
that had already spent six figures defending itself, and it didn't
want to keep paying to fight a big law firm. But it's hard to see
how this settlement addresses Jones Day's trademark complaint.
What's better about the new method of linking, from a trademark
point of view? It doesn't accomplish much other than to burden
BlockShopper with following a special style for Jones Day
items. If the firm's real goal was to squelch information it didn't
like—items about lawyers' home purchases—this settlement
doesn't accomplish that.
But in a larger sense, Jones Day won. The firm gained control
over how an online publisher builds hyperlinks. The actual
change Jones Day wrought may be small, but it signals to
companies that they can force sites to revise their linking styles
by alleging trademark infringement. And Judge Darrah's
decision not to dismiss the suit signals that Web publishers may
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have to spend significant sums to deal with this kind of
litigation.
Consider what it would mean for Web publishers if lots of other
companies decided to demand a say over how other sites linked
to them. Jones Day wants URLs used as anchor text, but it's not
hard to imagine that another company would want something
else—a name or a description, for instance. Web sites could then
be forced to use different linking protocols for every company
they write about. Not only would they lose control over stylistic
decisions, but accommodating a variety of individual requests
could prove clunky and labor intensive, which also means
expensive.
The Jones Day-BlockShopper settlement appears to be the first
precisely of this kind. Last December, neighborhood news site
Gatehouse Media sued the New York Times Co. for posting
Gatehouse headlines and first sentences on Boston.com, which
the Times owns. Gatehouse mainly complained that Boston.com
violated the Gatehouse copyright. That case, too, settled, when
the Times Co. agreed to stop publishing Gatehouse headlines
and openings. Digital rights advocates weren't happy about that.
But the case was mainly about whether Boston.com's use of the
Gatehouse words was a "fair use" of copyrighted material, not
the broader right to link. In fact, the agreement specifies that
Boston.com can continue to link to Gatehouse.
Other cases that have addressed links and copyright dealt with
the permissibility of "deep linking"—linking to a page other than
the home page—which, of course, is indeed permitted.
Ticketmaster famously lost a lawsuit against Tickets.com about
just this. But that case was about copyright infringement; by
making a trademark claim instead, Jones Day opened up another
legal avenue.
If sites really needed permission to link to others, the Web
would be a very different place. It's hard to imagine there would
be a Gawker, or for that matter a TMZ, a Wikipedia, or
anywhere else that embarrasses the subjects of posts. In another
example of an effort to stop linking, a city lawyer in Sheboygan,
Wis., demanded that blogger (and political critic) Jennifer
Reisinger remove from her site a link to the police department.
Reisinger has sued various city officials for violating her First
Amendment free speech rights. Her case is pending in federal
district court in Wisconsin. Let's hope the judge in Reisinger's
cases sees linking differently than Judge Darrah did. If cases like
these come out the wrong way, the Internet could go from a Web
to a series of one-way roads.
jurisprudence
See No Evil
Why is the Obama administration clinging to an indefensible state-secrets
doctrine?
By Dahlia Lithwick
The Obama administration is walking a tightrope. It's trying to
achieve a clean break from the worst of the Bush
administration's legal excesses while beating back efforts by
Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and others to pin an unnamed future
terror attack on Obama's naiveté. In general, and despite the
annoying preemptive I-told-you-sos from the architects of Bush's
terror policies, Obama has done the right things to signal that
safety and core human values need not be in conflict.
Obama pledged to close Guantanamo within a year, halted the
military commissions there, shut down CIA black sites, and
limited interrogation practices to clearly legal methods. His vice
president just announced in a major policy speech that "there is
no conflict between our security and our ideals"—a line echoing
his boss's inaugural address—and reiterated that America and
her allies share "a common commitment not only to live by the
rules but to enforce them." Obama has tapped for the most senior
positions in his Justice Department people who have been
outspoken critics of the Bush administration's extreme and
secretive arrogation of powers; people like Eric Holder, Dawn
Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron. This, perhaps
more than any single action on Obama's part, has signaled how
serious he is about capping the last administration's geyser of
President-Is-King nonsense.
How then, is it possible that Obama's Justice Department chose
to stay the course on one of the most embarrassing legal theories
advanced by the Bush administration—the so-called state-secrets
privilege? If you're going to cling to any aspect of the "war on
terror," wouldn't it make sense to choose a power that could
arguably forestall future terror attacks (like coercive
interrogation) rather than the utterly bogus argument that courts
are not fit to scrutinize government wrongdoing?
Yet in a San Francisco courtroom Monday, that is precisely what
the new Justice Department did. Administration lawyers held to
the Bush line of using the state-secrets privilege to urge the 9th
Circuit to block a civil suit filed by five foreign detainees against
Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary. This suit was filed by
the ACLU in 2007 on behalf of the five detainees and dismissed
by a district court last February. The ACLU was hoping to
reinstate the suit, which alleges that Jeppesen contracted with the
CIA to fly detainees to countries where they were tortured under
the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program. The abuse these
men describe in their court papers is appalling. Allegations have
recently surfaced in the British papers that one of the detainees,
Binyam Mohamed, had his "genitals . . . sliced with a scalpel."
This information was redacted by judges of the British High
Court, allegedly as a result of American threats. If the appeals
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court agrees with Obama's lawyers, this case will never get to a
court.
The state-secrets doctrine, as Henry Lanman explained here in
Slate, was a narrow evidentiary privilege until the Bush
administration laid its hands upon it. The perfectly reasonable
judge-made rule was that some evidence should not be made
public if it threatens national security (that's why it's called a
"privilege"). In a 1953 case from the Cold War, Reynolds v.
United States, the Supreme Court grafted a more capacious
British rule onto the American legal system. Years after
Reynolds, it was discovered that the only "state secret" the
government sought to preserve in that case was that there was no
state secret to protect. As Bruce Fein has written in his book
Constitutional Peril, the Reynolds decision "blinds itself to the
government's propensity for national security lies to avert civil
or criminal liability or political embarrassment."
Yet under the Bush administration, the state-secrets privilege
morphed into a basis to dismiss whole cases. No wonder the
Bush Justice Department invoked the privilege at least 39 times.
Until then, it had been used only 55 times since 1953.
Obama said during the campaign that he deplored the Bush
administration's use of the privilege "to get cases thrown out of
civil court." Last year, Joe Biden co-sponsored legislation that
would limit its use dramatically. And Obama's attorney general,
Eric Holder, announced at his confirmation hearing, "I will
review significant pending cases in which DoJ has invoked the
state-secrets privilege, and will work with leaders in other
agencies and professionals at the Department of Justice to ensure
that the United States invokes the state secrets privilege only in
legally appropriate situations." Indeed, as his subordinate was
invoking the privilege in court Monday, Holder was again
promising to review all pending state-secrets claims to ensure
that they weren't being used merely to shield the government
from scrutiny.
Of course, the alleged "secrets" being protected in Mohamed v.
Jeppesen Dataplan are not really all that secret anyhow. A
former Jeppesen employee told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker
that at an internal meeting, a senior Jeppesen official stated, "We
do all of the extraordinary rendition flights—you know, the
torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that
way." The details of the torture the detainees suing faced are
already widely known. Vincent Warren, executive director for
the Center for Constitutional Rights, notes that the rendition
victims themselves have been very open about their treatment
and that the government has admitted to it. So where exactly do
the state secrets come in? As Ben Wizner, the ACLU's counsel
for the plaintiffs, told Salon's Glenn Greenwald:
[T]he facts of this story are absolutely wellknown, have been the front pages of the New
York Times and Washington Post, are in
books, and all of these stories are based on
CIA and other government sources, that
essentially said, well, in this case we got the
wrong guy. So the position of the Bush
administration, accepted by conservative
judges in that case, really the only place in the
world where Khalid El-Masri's case could not
be discussed was in a federal courtroom.
Everywhere else it could be discussed without
harm to the nation, but in a federal court
before a federal judge there, all kinds of
terrible things could happen.
It is certainly possible that widespread public disclosure of some
specific evidence in this case would imperil national security.
Luckily, courts can protect against that: Judges can review
classified information and then decide what not to release.
What's astonishing is that the Obama administration nonetheless
took the position that the only remedy here is to dismiss the
whole suit. Which takes us back to the question: Why?
One possible answer is that water-boarding and Guantanamo
were so awful as to be indefensible, whereas the state-secrets
privilege at least sounds plausible. Another possibility is that the
Obama administration just hasn't had time to look carefully at
the state-secrets doctrine and was buying itself a little time
Monday by both continuing the policy and announcing a
massive review. A third possibility is that Obama is less willing
than he seemed before the election to shed the great dark cloak
of secrecy fashioned by his predecessor.
Along those lines, the Obama administration is also struggling
with how much to cut back the Bush expansion of executive
privilege. On the one hand, Obama, on his second day in office,
signed an executive order trimming back the Bush definition of
executive privilege for current and former presidents and
pledging "to usher in a new era of open government." On the
other hand, Obama's lawyers haven't yet said whether Karl Rove
may continue to invoke his wacky theory of privilege to dodge
congressional subpoenas.
There are many reasons for the Obama administration to toss out
dumb tactics employed by the Bush administration in the war on
terror while still holding onto its dumb secrecy claims, not the
least of which is that the Obama administration's secrets will
someday be evaluated by the next administration. We keep your
secrets, the next guy keeps ours. (Or so the president may hope.)
Finally, by keeping the worst of the Bush administration's
secrets hidden, the Obama Justice Department can defer
awkward questions about prosecuting the wrongdoers. In his
press conference Monday night, Obama repeated his mantra that
"nobody is above the law and if there are clear instances of
wrongdoing, people should be prosecuted just like ordinary
citizens. But generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking
34/104
forward than I am in looking backwards." The principle once
again is that Obama is for prosecuting Bush administration
lawbreaking only when proof of such lawbreaking bonks him on
the head. All the more reason to keep it out of sight, then.
It's a depressing hypothesis, and one about which I hope to be
proved wrong. Blocking the Jeppesen suit from going forward
serves no legitimate legal principle, although the political
advantages of doing so may turn out to be overwhelming. Of
course the Obama administration was supposed to understand
the difference between the two.
jurisprudence
There's a New Lawyer in Town
The top 10 cases the Obama Justice Department should redo.
By Emily Bazelon and Judith Resnik
Obama's inauguration shifted the gears of the Department of
Justice. In Week 1, the administration announced plans to
change positions on Guantanamo. In Week 2, Obama signed the
Lilly Ledbetter bill, helping plaintiffs suing for pay
discrimination, which Bush had threatened to veto. Around the
country, judges are asking what else will change and sometimes
giving the government extra time to figure out what it wants to
say in pending cases.
Which Bush legal positions should the new administration
reject? With thousands of cases left over from the Bush era still
pending, the question is a daunting one for the Obama team. But
we've taken a first crack at it and made a list of the top 10
positions that really should go. (Your additional suggestions are
welcome, in "The Fray" or via e-mail.)
Given that the Bush administration has been defending torture
and preventive detention and trying to block our knowledge of
its practices through a host of procedural maneuvers, we could
have filled the entire list with national security cases. But we
don't want to give the skewed sense that the legal problems
created by Bush's Justice Department are only in that area. The
overarching Bush effort that Obama's lawyers should reject is
the pervasive, insistent attempt to keep people out of the courts.
We picked cases that are vehicles for pushing back against that.
The first three are before the Supreme Court:
1. Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli
Ali Al-Marri, a national of Qatar, is in an unlucky category of
one: He was arrested while legally in the United States in 2001,
and then the government dropped criminal charges against him a
month before his trial, declared him an enemy combatant, and
threw him into a military brig. Marri has been in isolation since
2003, held uncharged and untried. The 4th Circuit fractured over
what the Bush administration had to show to keep Marri locked
up. The government has argued that Congress' 2001
authorization of the use of military force permits indefinite
domestic detention.
In December, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Marri's
challenge to his detention; on March 23, we'll hear from the
Obama DoJ. The Obama DoJ brief should embrace the courts'
authority to review the grounds for holding Marri and
acknowledge that Congress did not authorize domestic military
internment.
2. AT&T v. Hulteen
In December, AT&T argued to the Supreme Court that the
company's failure to credit Noreen Hulteen and three other
female employees for pregnancy leaves they took two decades
earlier when calculating their retirement benefits in the 1990s
was not discrimination on the basis of gender or pregnancy. And
even if there was an act of discrimination, AT&T continued, the
women had run out of time to sue. In part, the company relied on
the 2007 case of Lilly Ledbetter, who was told by the Supreme
Court that she was too late to get to court in her pay
discrimination case. (The majority read federal law to say that
Ledbetter had 180 days to sue from when she was first paid less
than men at her workplace for doing the same job, not when—
years later—she discovered that she'd been shortchanged
because she was a woman.)
At the Supreme Court, AT&T had the support of the Bush
Justice Department (though not, tellingly, of the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission). One of the first acts of
the new Congress, however, was to pass a bill, which Obama
supported as a senator and ceremoniously signed as president,
that reversed the Ledbetter ruling so that women like her could
get their day in court. The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act gives Obama's
DoJ a graceful entry to go back to the Supreme Court about
Hulteen. The government should ask the justices to return the
case to the 9th Circuit for reconsideration in light of the new
Ledbetter statute and its flexibility about the timing for paydiscrimination lawsuits.
3. Denedo v. United States
Jacob Denedo, a specialist 2nd class in the Navy, was told by his
lawyer that he should plead guilty in 1998 to a minor offense.
What his lawyer did not tell him was that, as a "collateral
consequence," he was at risk of being deported. (Born in
Nigeria, he'd immigrated to the United States in 1984 and
became a legal resident in 1990.) Several years later, when
Denedo's deportation process began, his new lawyers asked the
Court of Military Appeals for a hearing about whether his
original lawyer had been constitutionally deficient because he
had failed to tell his client that a guilty plea entailed the
possibility of deportation.
35/104
After the Court of Military Appeals agreed and granted the
hearing, the Bush administration stepped in and persuaded the
Supreme Court to hear the case. To head off the hearing, the
government has argued that, because life-tenured judges in the
civilian federal courts could conceivably hear Denedo's claim of
ineffective assistance of counsel, the military courts could not.
This case seems small, but it's another one that raises the
important question of access—which the Court of Military
Appeals got right. The new DoJ should ask the Supreme Court
not to hear the case after all, so that a hearing into the facts
surrounding Denedo's guilty plea can proceed in the place it
should—the military courts.
4. United States v. Jawad and United States v. Khadr
Moving to the appeals courts, a stream of petitions has been
brought by the Guantanamo detainees whom the Bush
administration deemed enemy combatants. It's time for the
administration to sort through the remaining 248 detainees.
(More here from Dahlia Lithwick on that.) The president has
halted the planned military commission trials at Guantanamo,
and now the Obama lawyers should decide whom to charge.
Most importantly, the new DoJ should stand up for the principle
that the government can't detain people outside the fabric of
constitutional law.
Mohammed Jawad was 16 or 17 when he was captured by the
Afghan police in 2002 for allegedly throwing a grenade that
severely injured American soldiers and an Afghan translator.
While in Guantanamo, he says, he has been subjected to sleep
deprivation and coerced into making a false confession. The
former lead prosecutor in his case before the military tribunal
now has switched sides and supports his appeal; he says that
Jawad poses no current danger and should be sent home.
Omar Khadr is accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan
in 2002. The Canadian was 15 when he was taken into American
custody. He says he was tortured and mistreated by the United
States at Bagram Air Force Base and Guantanamo. Last summer,
his lawyers released a video showing him crying and begging to
be released. In November, a federal judge sent Khadr back to
Bush's military commission system, which Obama halted at the
beginning of his presidency. The Obama DoJ should either try
Khadr in federal court or send him back to Canada.
5. Arar v. Ashcroft and Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan
We know what happened to Maher Arar because the Canadian
government has thoroughly investigated his experience of
extraordinary rendition. In 2002, agents of the United States,
whom the Canadians did not stop, shipped off Arar to Syria,
where he was tortured while being interrogated for a year for his
suspected links to al-Qaida. The Canadian government cleared
Arar in 2006, apologized, and awarded him $10 million.
Condoleezza Rice's State Department admitted that it
mishandled his case. Arar wants redress in U.S. courts, under
American law, to hold U.S. officials responsible.
Unlike the Canadians, the Bush administration refused to
apologize and settle. Instead, its DoJ argued that neither the
Constitution nor any federal statute (including the Torture
Victim Protection Act) protects Arar, and further that the inquiry
he wanted would require revealing "state secrets." A three-judge
panel of the 2nd Circuit found additional reasons to cut off Arar
from being heard in U.S. courts, but the full court, which heard
argument in December, is reconsidering the case. Obama's DoJ
should tell the court it need not rule, because the government is
dropping the Bush position that Arar has no access to U.S.
courts, and ask for time to reach a fair settlement with him.
In another case about extraordinary rendition and state secrets,
five men who say the United States tortured them abroad are
suing private contractor Jeppesen Dataplan for setting up the
flights that took them to secret American prisons in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and elsewhere. The Bush administration intervened in
the case to shield itself and private contractors, and said that the
subject matter of the suit is a state secret. The district court
dismissed the case without independent inquiry into whether the
information was really secret. The 9th Circuit hears arguments in
this case today; the Obama DoJ should live up to the
administration's commitment to transparency and drop the
blanket state-secrets defense so that these men can present
relevant evidence.
6. Rasul v. Myers, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, Padilla v. Rumsfeld, and
Padilla v. Yoo
Several other cases also raise questions about how to redress the
wrongs of torture and detention: In Rasul v. Myers, four British
detainees held for two years at Guantanamo are suing for
damages based on their allegations that they were tortured
(beaten and shackled) and suffered religious discrimination
(desecration of the Quran). Last year, the D.C. Circuit dismissed
their claims by accepting the Bush administration's argument
that the men could not sue under the Geneva Conventions, the
U.S. Constitution, or a federal anti-discrimination law. (For that
last one, the court had to rule that the detainees did not qualify as
"persons" under the relevant statute.) The D.C. Circuit also said
that even assuming the suit could proceed, the officials being
sued had qualified immunity, meaning they shouldn't be held
responsible because they couldn't have reasonably been expected
to know that what they did was illegal.
We know that the new DoJ is under a great deal of pressure to
protect government officials from liability. But that's not what its
pronounced commitments to accountability and responsibility
permit. In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, argued before the Supreme Court in
December before Obama took office, Bush lawyers tried to stop
another lawsuit dead in its tracks with the claim that high-level
officials should not even have to answer complaints brought
against them.
The new government should take the bold step of retracting that
position and accepting the obligation of government to account
36/104
for its actions. In all of these cases, Obama's lawyers don't have
to abandon the defense of "qualified immunity." But the DoJ
should stop using it as an absolute shield. The rule should be that
the government accedes to hearings on whether, given the
relevant facts, government officials can convince judges that
what they did at the time was based on their reasonable "good
faith" belief that their actions were constitutional. This would
open up another question: Can government officials use the
torture memos as alibis? That is exactly the question that
lawyers and judges should face.
The torture memos loom large in Padilla v. Rumsfeld and
Padilla v. Yoo, which are also about redressing the wrong of
mistreatment and alleged torture and whether high-level officials
are immune to suit. Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested in
the Chicago airport and thrown into a military brig on neverproven "dirty bomber" charges, sued the officials whom his
lawyers think are responsible for his detention and the
mistreatment he endured in prison. (The stories of his
deterioration are deeply disturbing.) These suits request
vindication, not money—asking only $1 in damages. The
Obama administration should respond by admitting wrongdoing
and apologizing as well as by releasing still-secret DoJ memos
(which the next case on our list also seeks).
7. ACLU v. DoD
In 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union began filing
lawsuits to enforce its requests, under the Freedom of
Information Act, for the release of memos by the Office of Legal
Counsel that gave a green light to the Bush administration's
policies of detention, interrogation, surveillance, and
extraordinary rendition. (The government even argued that it
was protecting prisoners' privacy by refusing to release pictures.)
The ACLU has won some of its battles, including a judgment in
the 2nd Circuit in September of 2008 requiring it to produce
some of the memos. Yet the ACLU says that "most of the key
OLC memos are still being withheld." This chart from
ProPublica tracks which OLC documents are being kept secret.
The Obama administration should comply with FOIA by
dropping Bush's broad claims of executive privilege, review all
of the OLC documents to determine which, if any, need to
remain classified—as Dawn Johnsen, Obama's choice to head
the OLC, has argued—and make the rest public.
8. United States v. New York City Board of Education
In 1996, the Clinton Justice Department sued the New York City
Board of Education over discriminatory recruitment for school
custodian jobs. The New York schools had been relying for
hiring on word of mouth among male custodians and leaving out
women and minorities, the lawsuit alleged. In a 1999 settlement,
the DoJ and the city schools agreed that 50 women and minority
custodians who'd been doing their jobs provisionally would get
permanent employment and retroactive seniority. Then a group
of white male custodians who didn't like the settlement entered
the case, arguing that they were victims of reverse
discrimination. By then, President Bush was in office. His DoJ
refused to defend the settlement agreement for all of the white
women and some of the minorities, and instead used the case to
attack affirmative action. That was a switch by the DoJ in the
wrong direction.
The women and minority custodians succeeded in defending
most of the settlement before a district court judge last year.
Now that ruling is on appeal to the 2nd Circuit, and the DoJ
should go back to the original Clinton stance. The Obama
lawyers should reject the Bush position and return to defending
the 1999 settlement as well as the principle of breaking down old
patterns of job segregation in public employment.
9. In re Polar Bear Litigation
Moving to the district courts, environmental groups sued the
Bush administration in 2005 to protect the polar bear under the
Endangered Species Act, because its habitat is disappearing as
warming Arctic temperatures shrink the sea ice. Last May, a
district court judge ruled that the Interior Department had to
follow the ESA and make a decision about whether to protect the
bear. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne gave in and listed the
polar bear as threatened—at significant risk of becoming
endangered by midcentury. But Kempthorne took a swipe at the
ESA, calling it "perhaps the least flexible law Congress has ever
enacted," and issued a rule providing that greenhouse gases
could not be regulated in order to protect the bear. The
administration also ruled out any limits on oil or gas exploration.
"So this leaves everything as it was, in a way," Andrew Revkin
wrote in the New York Times.
The Obama administration has already broken with the Bush
administration by accepting a judge's order to regulate the
mercury from power plants and issuing a promising memo about
standards for the energy efficiency of appliances. It should also
bump up the polar bear's listing from threatened to endangered
and withdraw the rule that exempts greenhouse gases from
regulation that would help protect the bear.
10. Thompson v. HUD
We close by highlighting the struggles of district Judge Marvin
Garbis, who tried to rectify the Bush administration's violations
of anti-discrimination law. In 2005, Garbis held that the
Department of Housing and Urban Development violated the
Fair Housing Act by unfairly concentrating African-American
public-housing residents in the most impoverished, segregated
areas of Baltimore. The judge faulted HUD for treating
Baltimore as "an island reservation for use as a container for all
of the poor of a contiguous region." Faced with the judge's
ruling, the Bush administration argued that he had no authority
to order a remedy and then did not address the severe
segregation it has spawned—despite Judge Garbis' admonition
that "it is high time that HUD live up to its statutory mandate."
37/104
The plaintiffs in this case are proposing an innovative plan that
takes a regional approach to desegregation and helps publichousing residents move out of Baltimore to parts of Maryland
with more job opportunities. The new government should stop
stonewalling and start figuring out how to desegregate.
"Webster?" I said. "You're seeing Webster!"
DoJ, we appreciate that there's a lot of work to do.
"Webster doesn't know what love is!" I cried. "Merri, I adore
you, worship you, I'm your admirer, your follower, your
aficionado, your enthusiast, your fan, your devotee, your
adherent, your buff! Webster can't be those things. What can he
give you that I cannot?"
She toggled her head vertically and released air from her lungs.
"Webster loves me," she said.
low concept
Roget in Love
"Meaning," she whispered. "He gives me meaning."
What happens when there are too many ways to say "I love you."
By Hart Seely
"Wait a minute. I thought Funk and Wagnall gave you meaning!
Remember them? I guess their meanings weren't so definitive,
eh?"
It was a mistake, a gaffe, an error, plummeting in on Merriam
that day. When she looked at me with those big brown organs of
vision, I felt myself omit a cardio pulsation.
"I don't do three-ways," she said.
"Well, well, if it isn't Mr. Thesaurus, Peter Roget," she said.
"Look what the Felis silvestris catus just imported."
Merriam had a way with units of language.
"I've come to talk, speak, communicate, converse, correspond," I
said.
"Peter," she interrupted, "I don't have time to masticate the
obesity. Excrete, or remove yourself from the cookery."
"Very well. I won't thrash around the foliage. I apologize if I
urinated you off.
I've come to request your unclenched fist in holy matrimony."
Her mandible plunged and her occuli hydrated.
"Peter, I'm sorry," she said. "But you're a global cycle late and a
Federal Reserve note short. We're through."
"Through? Do you mean, as in, done, completed, and defunct?
Or through as in via or by means of?"
"Peter, we're ceased. I'm tired of beating my head against a
permanent partition of oven-baked blocks. For a long time now,
we've been like two floating vessels passing in the regular period
of darkness between sunset and sunrise."
That's when it hit me.
"Well, you sure get around. Whatever happened to that 'May I
quote you' creep? Remember how 'familiar' you were with him?"
"Leave Bartlett out of this," she said.
"Merri," I said. "Listen to me. Webster will dump you, ditch
you, scrap you, chuck you, abandon you, discard you. Right
now, he's probably out with Collier or Compton or some tramp
from Oxford. You're just another plume in his visor headpiece.
"He'll abridge you!" I continued. "He'll file you under M for
merriment or merry maker, or messy. That's what Webster does.
He draws you the size of a postage stamp, then he turns the
page!"
"You're too late, Peter," she said, raising a ringed metacarpal.
"We've recited nuptials."
"You'll come back!" I shouted. "You'll crawl back on your
grasping forelimbs and kneeling leg joints! You two have as
much chance together as a compacted sphere of frozen water in
hell!"
She closed the door. That was the last time I saw Merri.
Of course, these days, she's the last word on everything, the
famous Merriam Webster. Me? I'm lost, misplaced, missing,
alone …
I loved her.
I just couldn't find the words.
38/104
Don't hang around his place all the time. While it might be
exciting for you to be shrunk down and transported through a
lamp spout, that's his daily commute.
low concept
Rubbing Him the Right Way
How to find the genie of your dreams—and keep him coming back for more.
By Frank Lesser
Whenever I'm out diamond-shopping with my genie, strangers
come up to me and say, "You guys seem so happy together. How
do you do it?" Well, when Shalazam is out of earshot, I tell them
that freeing a magical being from a lamp is easy. Making things
last is hard work.
A lot of genies think humans are only interested in one thing:
wishes. Prove him wrong. When your new genie offers you three
wishes, shrug and tell him, "No thanks, I'm cool right now."
He'll be puzzled ... and intrigued.
A few days later, casually ask your genie for the name of his
favorite band. Then, after another week or so, tell your genie that
you'd finally like your first wish: two front row tickets to that
band's next show. He'll be impressed you remembered the little
things.
Don't use up all your wishes on the first night. By the time you
get to "third wish," you want your genie to hang around because
he wants to, not because the ancient laws of his race are forcing
him to.
Shalazam has been my genie for almost five years, and we've
never lost the magic. My secret: Sometimes I let him think that
he's the master! Every once in a while, tell your genie how allpowerful he's been looking. And tell him that you love how his
earrings match his lamp handle, even (especially!) if they don't.
Accept the fact that genies rarely update their style. I once made
the mistake of telling Shalazam that the "fez look" went out of
fashion with the Ottoman Empire, and he turned me into a
camel. Today we laugh about it, but at the time I wanted to spit
in his face.
Don't think you can start calling your genie a djinn in an affected
Arabic accent. It comes across as condescending. And don't ever
call him "Mr. Clean," even as a joke. Only they can call
themselves that.
Go the extra mile. Anyone can rub a genie's lamp, but a
thoughtful master will buff and polish it. Incidentally, it's 2009.
See if your genie wouldn't mind switching to a compact
fluorescent bulb.
Show your genie a good time. Since he's a spirit born of
smokeless fire, you can take him to restaurants regardless of
smoking bans. But keep in mind that societal mores have
changed in the past 1,000 years. Most of today's fine-dining
establishments require patrons to wear a T-shirt beneath their
gold-fringed vest.
If you think things with your genie could work out long-term,
get him a green card. It'll save you a lot of trouble in the long
run. Look at it from the authorities' point of view: Here's a
strange man with a Middle Eastern accent and no papers who's
wearing a vest, and you can't check his shoes for explosives
because his feet end in smoky wisps.
Shalazam is currently applying for citizenship, although he's had
trouble holding down a job for more than a month or two. You'd
think someone who caters to his master's every whim would
have an easy time in the service industry, but when customers tip
poorly he tends to summon up sandstorms.
Too many people keep trying to make things work with a bad
genie, no matter how many times their wishes have gone
tragically or ironically awry. "I'm sure he just misheard me
again," they think to themselves. "It's so tough to hear anything
over that 12-inch pianist." If things with your genie do come to
an end, remember that there are plenty of wish-granting fish in
the sea. Don't make the mistake of rushing to find a new genie,
thinking you can use your first wish to get your old one back. No
one likes hearing how good a former genie was at granting
wishes.
Household objects might make you think of an old genie. A
throw rug might remind you of the time the two of you took a
magic carpet ride to the moon. Or a platinum hookah filled with
diamonds might remind you of the time you wished for a
platinum hookah filled with diamonds. Fortunately, Shalazam
helped me deal with these issues when he incinerated my
mansion after I called him Mr. Clean.
Are things with Shalazam perfect? Of course not. He says I take
his wishes for granted, and I don't like that he always insists on
splitting the check. And of course there was the time I told him I
wanted to see other genies, and he blotted out the sun and made
me watch everyone I love shrivel away, and then he reversed
time and undid it and then redid it, over and over until I changed
my mind.
Still, the most important thing I've learned is that you should
never use a wish to change your genie. He has to want to change
on his own.
39/104
low concept
Dick Cheney Remembers
Excerpts from the former vice president's forthcoming memoir.
By Hart Seely
In his first interview since leaving public office, former Vice
President Dick Cheney told Politico last week that he's ready to
start writing his memoirs. Slate has obtained the following
excerpts from an early draft.
It was heartbreaking. He looked at me with those sad, defeated
eyes and rasped, "Mr. Vice President, I let you down." Well,
what could I say? I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "No,
please, never think that way." But, inside, I was angry with him.
I wanted to shout, "Christ, Harry, what in hell were you doing,
poking your big face right into my line of fire?"
…
I knew from her glassy-eyed grin that Lynne was well into her
fourth tequila and valium. "Guesh what," she said. "Your pretty
little daughter has gone and got himself a girlfriend."
…
I'll never forget the anguish in his voice. "You have no choice,
son," he said. "You've simply got to take that military
deferment." I felt punched in the gut. "No!" I shouted. "No,
damn you! No! That's the fifth time you've done this to me!"
The hippies were out there, protesting a war that we were
waging to defend their right to protest wars. Sadly, they couldn't
see the reality: During wartime, there's just no place for that kind
of protest.
…
…
Without telling anyone, Nixon and I had worked up a little
routine. I asked, "Who is the Vietnamese foreign minister?"
Immediately, he chimed in, "No, Woo is on first!" The whole
room cracked up. Kissinger had to take a pill.
I warned Scooter about talking to Robert Novak. "Remember," I
said. "No matter what he says, no matter how he acts, he's CNN.
We're Fox."
…
…
"Let me get this straight," I said. "I choose your running mate?"
George gave a wide grin. "You got it, Chief," he said. "Freddie
Thompson, Newt, Lugar—heck, even Old Man McCain. You
name him, and I'll go with him. Will you do it?"
I felt a shiver rise up my spine. "I'm very busy these days," I
said. "But I'll consider it."
…
Throughout the president's colonoscopy, I stayed cool as a
cucumber.
Sorry, folks, but it's not torture to have a little water poured on
you. You want torture? Try a two-hour piano recital from
Condoleezza Rice.
…
They said, "Dick, for the sake of the country, we need you in a
safe, secret location, out of the public eye." I knew they were
right, but, still, I longed to be away from those salt deposits and
back above ground.
"Let me be their target," I said. "Put me out front. Let me be
your poster boy. Let me be your bait. I'm not afraid of being a
target."
…
But McCain's people wouldn't buy it.
"We want to see the minutes of your energy-policy meetings,"
she barked, her snotty, liberal leftist nose high in the air. "We
want to know the lobbyists you've met with." I just stared
through her. "Listen, missy," I replied. "You're not fooling me.
You're trying to find out what we're doing, so you can tell
everybody, and that's not going to happen!"
…
…
Paulson looked dazed, confused, like a deer in headlights. "It's
all turning to shit," he whispered. "Everything is collapsing!
We're going down!"
I slapped him hard across the face, leaving a red blotch on his
cheek. "Get a grip," I barked. "I'll call Rove. He'll fix this."
40/104
…
Mark my words: There will be another terrorist attack.
Thousands will die. Millions will suffer. When it happens,
America will see at last that we were right. History will
vindicate us, and we'll receive the respect we rightfully deserve.
Not that I would ever want that, of course.
…
The other day, as Lynne and I watched a storm approaching over
the horizon, we pondered the incredible journey that has been
our lives. Until that moment, I never realized how much Dubai
looks like old Wyoming.
…
I love America. There! I said it! Sue me. I don't care. Because
the one thing I've learned is that all the missiles, all the armies,
and all the bombs in this big crazy world cannot defeat love. So
there you have it, liberals: This "war criminal" pleads guilty as
charged—guilty of believing in the power of love.
medical examiner
Pregnant Pause
Who should pay for in vitro fertilization?
By Darshak Sanghavi
The recent birth of octuplets to 33-year-old Nadya Suleman was,
if nothing else, at least a one-woman economic stimulus package
for medical professionals in the Los Angeles area. Delivering the
babies provided gainful employment to four dozen doctors,
nurses, and affiliated staff. Apart from generating hundreds of
thousands of dollars in billable care for the Kaiser Permenente
Medical Center in Bellflower, where the octuplets are still
hospitalized, Suleman's actions also enriched the West Coast
IVF clinic run by Dr. Michael Kamrava, which serviced the
young mother by implanting at least a dozen viable embryos in
her uterus thus far.
Still unclear is how Suleman paid for her multiple IVF
procedures, since she is unemployed. Even if she did have
employer-based health insurance, California, like most states,
does not require insurers to pay for IVF—so many don't.
Suleman apparently collected $168,000 in disability payments
for a back injury in 1999, which may have helped cover her
procedures.
The octuplets' birth has revived the debate about the proper
means, if any, to regulate assisted reproduction. And though it's
tempting to see Suleman's choices as nailing the case for making
IVF less accessible, the data suggest such a strategy would have
unintended consequences that would hurt children and families,
and ultimately cost us all more money. We should be making
IVF more accessible.
Roughly 10 percent of couples experience infertility, a rate
possibly accelerated by the increasing average age of prospective
mothers. This demographic trend of older mothers is
encouraging (since higher maternal age is a powerful predictor
of financial security and the child's future social and educational
attainment), but the odds of successful spontaneous pregnancy
are lower. And so women increasingly turn to fertility treatments
such as ovarian hyperstimulation, which forces the ovaries to
pump out more eggs per cycle and increases the risk of having
twins or triplets, and IVF, in which fertilized eggs, or embryos,
are implanted in the uterus directly. Almost one in 80 newborns
in the United States owes his existence to IVF.
To understand how financial incentives affect IVF practices, one
must first grasp that the probability of a successful pregnancy is
proportional to the number of implanted embryos. Implanting
just one embryo leads to pregnancy roughly 40 percent to 50
percent of the time; two embryos are 75 percent successful; and
three embryos are 87 percent successful. Because the cost of
each IVF cycle is about $10,000, most women paying out-ofpocket want to succeed the first time and choose to implant three
to four embryos.
More eggs also mean more twins, triplets, and higher-order
multiples; generally, multiples are sicker at birth and cost more.
Such births are responsible for one-quarter of all premature
delivery before 32 weeks gestation and one-quarter of all very
low birth weight (under 1.5 kilograms). They're also an
important contributor to infant mortality rates. Consider, too,
that every preemie born before 28 weeks costs about $66,000 for
neonatal care alone—not including future special education
needs, chronic illnesses, family support services, and other
expenses. Though it's tempting to fixate on Suleman's set of
budget-busting octuplets, they're just taking a tiny fraction of the
total costs associated with the multiples who result from
infertility therapy like IVF.
In 2002, Harvard Medical School researchers found,
unsurprisingly, that compared with women who pay out of
pocket, those whose insurance fully covered IVF were
significantly less likely to have multiples since they chose to
have fewer implanted embryos. And while international
comparisons are fraught with confounders, it's worth noting that
Sweden and Australia have almost twice as many IVF births per
capita as we do, yet their infant mortality rates remain
comfortably lower. At least one difference may be that their
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national health insurances subsidize IVF, and thus there is less
incentive to implant multiple embryos per cycle.
Another key difference is that many other countries also legally
limit the number of embryos transferred in the first IVF
attempts. (For example, Belgium permits only single embryo
transfers.) Here, no legally binding regulations exist. The
American Society of Reproductive Medicine recommends no
more than two embryos in women under 35 years old, but
flouting these policies doesn't lead to a loss of license.
Taken together, America has selected a policy that encourages
multiples. Since insurers aren't compelled to cover costs for IVF,
self-paying women attempt to get pregnant in as few cycles as
possible. As a result, officials find it hard to justify legally
restricting how many embryos can be implanted. Since they're
paying for it, the thinking goes, women should be free to implant
as many embryos as they wish. The result? More multiples,
more costs, poorer child health, and, on occasion, bizarre cases
like that of Nadya Suleman.
There's a cleaner way to handle the costs and regulation of IVF
to reduce multiples, and that strategy was recently adopted by
Sweden. In 2004, Scandinavian doctors reported that implanting
one embryo at a time, repeatedly if necessary, resulted in the
same final pregnancy rates as implanting several at once—with
the incidence of multiples reduced to less than 1 percent of births
in the sequential single-transfer group from 33 percent in the
multiple-transfer group. The Swedes ran with the results: Their
national health insurance now fully covers repeated IVF
attempts with a single embryo but limits coverage if women
instead choose to implant multiples embryos. It's too early to
quantify the results, but the approach makes a lot of sense.
Ultimately, mandating coverage for IVF won't break the bank.
According to one analysis, adding it would increase yearly
premiums by only 0.1 to 0.3 percent (about $20 per year) and
may lead to overall savings. Such coverage may also soften
opponents of IVF regulation, so limits on embryo transfers could
become politically viable, though it would presumably be a
contentious issue. Most basically: Wouldn't it be better, in the
end, to allow eight previously infertile women to experience
healthy single pregnancies and deliveries, rather than invest our
collective medical resources to let one woman give birth to
premature octuplets?
medical examiner
In Your Eye, Jenny McCarthy
A special court rejects autism-vaccine theories.
By Arthur Allen
The three federal judges who convincingly rejected the theory
that vaccines cause autism delivered a devastating blow to crank
science today. The battle will go on in the blogs and in the
courts. But the most important arena has always been the space
between the ears of parents who are deciding whether it's safe to
vaccinate their kids. This decision could do a heap of good by
stemming the tide of vaccine-shunning that has led to outbreaks
of preventable disease.
The rulings cap 10 years of divisive legal, scientific, and
rhetorical battles. In reality, the science looked pretty settled by
the end of 2002, as the first of 5,000 parents of autistic children
began lodging claims in the Federal Court of Appeals' special
vaccine injury compensation program. Hundreds of millions of
dollars later, the court concluded as most other observers have
for years. This was a slam dunk. "Petitioners' theories of
causation were speculative and unpersuasive," wrote Special
Master Denise Vowell in the case of Colten Snyder v. HHS. "To
conclude that Colten's condition was the result of his MMR
vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis
Carroll's White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or
at least highly improbable) things before breakfast."
The vaccine court, which began operating in 1990, assigns
special masters to weigh claims of vaccine injury brought by
parents or guardians. In their ruling in the Autism Omnibus, the
special masters considered three test cases in which the parents
of autistic children alleged damage by two "toxic" vaccine
mechanisms acting in concert. Traces of ethyl mercury in several
vaccines had weakened their children's immune systems as
infants, went the plaintiffs' theory, which allowed the measlesmumps-rubella vaccine to damage their brains when it was
administered after their first birthdays.
In one of the cases, Special Master George L. Hastings declared
the evidence against vaccines contributing to the injuries of
Michelle Cedillo, a severely retarded and autistic wheelchairbound 14-year-old, was "overwhelming." I have no doubt, he
wrote, "that the Cedillo parents and relatives are sincere in their
belief that the MMR vaccine played a role in causing Michelle's
devastating disorders. Unfortunately, the Cedillos have been
misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross
medical misjudgment."
This comment got to the nub of the case. The vaccine court is
intended to bolster our mandatory immunization program by
offering compensation to children truly damaged by vaccines
while avoiding excessive litigation. But in the autism case,
plaintiffs, and especially their lawyers, forced taxpayers and the
pharmaceutical industry to spend millions to defeat a clearly
flawed theory.
At one point in testimony, a University of Virginia pediatric
neurologist named Robert Rust tried to explain the dogged
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persistence of the vaccines-cause-autism theory. The believers
have many data points at their fingertips, thanks to the Internet.
Rust compared them to Tycho Brahe, the 16th-century
astronomer who convinced his contemporaries that the sun
revolved around the Earth. Frustrated parents and scientists who
have long rejected the vaccine-autism connection frequently
return to that analogy. Alison Singer quit her leadership position
in the charity Autism Speaks because she tired of its demand for
more vaccine studies. "The question has been asked and
answered and it's time to move on," she told Newsweek last
month. "We need to be able to say, 'Yes, we are now satisfied
that the earth is round.' "
Today's ruling isn't the only bad news for the vaccine-autism
theory. It suffered another blow in the court of public opinion
earlier this week when the Times of London reported that British
gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield may have altered data in
his 1998 Lancet study that first raised the possibility of a link
between MMR and autism. It had previously been reported that a
law firm paid Wakefield in the neighborhood of $1 million to
conduct examinations of autistic children whose parents blamed
the MMR shot, a fact he did not disclose to the editors of the
Lancet.
It's hard to overestimate the impact of Wakefield's paper in terms
of disease, unfounded worry, and the expenditure of hundreds of
millions of legal dollars. In Britain, which has no compulsory
vaccination, rates of MMR vaccination fell from 92 percent to as
low as 80 percent. Herd immunity slipped away; as a result, last
year there were 1,348 British measles cases, including two
deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations, compared with 56 cases
in 1998.
Surveys of U.S. parental opinion conducted for the American
Medical Association in 2006 and 2008 show growing concern
about the safety of vaccines. A study done by APCO Insight
found that about 18 percent of parents had changed their
vaccination practices out of safety concerns—compared with 12
percent in 2006. An outbreak of 135 cases of measles around the
United States last year—the biggest in a decade—began in
unvaccinated children. Haemophilus influenzae type B, a disease
nearly eliminated by a vaccine, killed an unvaccinated child in
Minnesota last year.
There's hope that today's ruling will reverse that trend. It won't
affect the true believers. The notion that a government-backed,
pharmaceutical-company-enriching program damaged their
children has become a crusade and hobby and hangout for
thousands of people, including movie stars like Jenny McCarthy
and Jim Carrey, as well as doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and
even a few scientists. An industry of hucksters, personal-injury
lawyers, and clueless alternative-medicine practitioners has fed
off of the desperation of parents of autistic children. Many
parents, frantic to alter their children's diagnosis, turn to untested
drugs, foods, vitamins, and extracts that promise to halt, or even
reverse, autism—promising claims that some parents cling to.
In a brief filed in January, Cedillo's lawyers threatened to flood
the courts with their claims should they lose the case. They
wrote, "[I]t would behoove the parties, and the manufacturers, to
join forces and achieve a global settlement in the Vaccine
Program. The alternative is civil litigation by thousands of
profoundly damaged autistic children and their families in all 50
states."
An appeals court will likely review the findings, and the
claimants have the right to sue in regular courts once the vaccine
court denies them compensation. But in the past two decades,
the vaccine court's rulings have been effective in keeping
vaccine litigation out of the civil court system.
That what's heartening about today's decision. A profoundly
democratic institution, in which judges do their best to offer
justice to the casualties of public health, gave 10,000 parents
their day in court. But as they sing in The Unsinkable Molly
Brown, "The lord answered your prayers. The answer was no."
It's time to move on.
medical examiner
Growth Industry
Male-enhancement products that won't spice up your Valentine's Day.
By Kent Sepkowitz
Male enhancement and the Internet are inextricably linked, as
anyone with an unfiltered e-mail account knows. Promises of
instant expansion appear daily, seeming to inhabit that happy
area of infomercials and self-sharpening knives with limitedtime offers that lies just outside the real world.
Even though the big promises have a shady pedigree, are all
attempts at enlargement futile? If we can fly a man to the moon,
split the atom, and flatten our abs, can't we stretch things another
measly inch or two? As a Valentine's Day exercise, let's examine
the facts about male enhancement to see if it is all snake oil (of a
very literal sort) or whether there actually are things a guy can
do to improve.
Broadly speaking, there are two promised pathways to more
bigness: the surgical and nonsurgical. And because you will
need a little time to prepare yourself before we pull out the
scalpel, let's start with nonsurgical approaches. First come pills
and tonics, the distant region patrolled by Smilin' Bob, Enzyte's
very pleased pitchman. Enzyte is one of many herbal approaches
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to enhancement; the products vary widely in price and
composition. (Most contain ginseng, saw palmetto, horny goat
weed, and a handful of other remedies.) Bob has had a tough
time recently—Enzyte's founder, Steve Warshak, and Steve's
mom, Harriet, were sentenced to the slammer in 2006 and fined
$500 million for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud,
and money laundering. (How, you might ask, could this be a
$500 million business? Welcome to America, buddy.) Do these
pills work? The FDA can't regulate herbals because—well,
because they probably don't work, so they don't need oversight,
see? As very little supports the effectiveness of these herbal
offerings, I suggest you look elsewhere.
Another nonsurgical approach is very low tech and centuries if
not millennia old: You just stretch the damn thing. Try tying a
weight (like a rock or something more elaborate) around the
glans, or sink a few bucks into a Procrustean device (there are
lots), or, for a more yogic experience, jelq. Jelqing one's wanger
is device-free, not unlike stretching salt-water taffy, and, though
painful-appearing, has an ardent following. The Internet is
awash with jelqing videos and sworn testimonials. Finally,
Austin Powers' old friend the vacuum pump promises to work its
magic by the disturbing method of sucking ever more blood into
the penis and then … actually, I'm not sure what happens next—
maybe your blood stalls in there for a while and you can impress
someone. But any size that might appear will wash away soon
enough.
That was the easy part. Now prepare for the wide world of
surgical improvement. Proponents of the male-domination
theory of everything should take note of the fact that cosmetic
breast enhancement has been around for 100 years. In 2007,
350,000 such surgeries were performed, some as part of postmastectomy reconstruction, others for nonmedical reasons. If the
voracious male gaze is driving much of this (advantage, male
supremacy theorists), why is the state of surgical penile
enlargement still in its infancy? (Besides castration anxiety, the
risk of disfiguring scars, and the fact that it is such a stupid idea.)
Whatever the explanation, here are the options. The simplest,
least bloody thing to sign on for is something called a
suspensory ligament release. Normally, the base of the penis is
connected to the pubic bone by a ligament to anchor the entire
enterprise. But this stabilization comes with a substantial cost: a
precious inch or so. Surgeons reviewing the situation figured the
top of the base of the penis doesn't have to be that close to the
navel, so with a little snip here and a little snip there, the penis is
released to reclaim the valuable real estate. Sounds easy enough,
so why not hurry out and get it done before Valentine's Day? For
one thing, ligament release adds length only to the flaccid penis.
You'll hang a little lower, but once erect, you'll have what you've
always had—not a micrometer more. Plus, any surgery comes
with risks (a wildly swinging, unanchored erection among
them). Indeed, the American Urologic Association does not
consider suspensory ligament release safe or efficacious.
Finally, there is the major league of penis surgery. The simplest
procedure is akin to what is done with lips, breasts, and other
area in need of a little puffing up: inject collagen, a person's own
fat (aka a dermal fat graft), or a pricy product like AlloDerm,
which is something of an all-purpose human putty. This
approach can address the all-important girth problem but, alas,
does nothing for length.
If length is what you're after, you'll have to endure the gruesome.
For example, you may need Triple Augmentation Phalloplasty,
which includes the suspensory ligament release and a nip and
tuck elsewhere. Be aware that phalloplasty, a mostly made-up
term referring to surgery to reshape the penis, is a bit of a new
surgical discipline. That said, its practitioners already have their
own society (the American Academy of Phalloplasty Surgeons),
which in turn underwrites the International Phalloplasty
Institute, and they hold conferences. They even have a manifesto
that (guess what?) concludes that cosmetic penis surgery is a
safe and medically accepted procedure. Best of all, they offer a
course open to "all surgeons" to learn the techniques—a course
that covers soup to nuts in just three days. If you do visit these
Web sites, prepare to see photos of men sporting unusually
vigorous moustaches.
The most radical approach to lengthening is pioneered by
surgeons at the University of Belgrade. They simply unpack the
penis, add a little rib, and sew him back up. Here is the method
of Drs. S.V. Perovic and M.L.J. Djordjevic:
The penis is completely disassembled into its
anatomical parts; the glans cap [head] remains
attached dorsally to the neurovascular bundle
and ventrally to the urethra and corporal
bodies. A space is created between glans cap
and the tip of corpora cavernosa [the shaft];
this space is used to insert autologous cartilage
previously harvested from the rib [yes, your
rib], the space being measured beforehand
when the corpora cavernosa are erect. The
anatomical entities and inserted cartilage are
joined together to form a longer penis.
See how simple that was? Those still interested should peruse
the accompanying pictures (you may need to click the link twice
to open it) and illustrations before booking a ticket to Belgrade.
Maybe surgery isn't ready for prime time, at least for most
people, and the pills don't work, and the thought of tying a stone
to the head of your penis seems Neanderthal. But do not let hope
perish—the dream must never die. There's plenty of good news
in the field (OK, not that much). Important research is being
done even as we speak. In Thailand, scientists are working long
hours, sometimes in difficult circumstances, with a single goal in
mind: to elongate the penises of rats. Yes, friends, a technique to
enhance our rodent neighbors may be only years away. The
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approach is so elegantly simple: The investigators inject cells
from the small intestine of pigs into the rat penis (of course!),
and, bingo, those lucky rats have the biggest members in their
colony. But, guys, until this research has matured a bit more,
may I suggest that this Valentine's Day you show up with the
usual—flowers and chocolates—and keep the big news on wellhung rats to yourself.
moneybox
This Isn't Your Grandfather's Recession
Tax cuts won't solve our current economic woes.
By Daniel Gross
The congressional debate over the stimulus package may be
over, but the larger debate isn't. Many critics of the bill, which
contains a mix of tax cuts and government spending, believe that
the government spending part just won't work. Thirty-six of the
41 members of the Republican Senate minority voted for an
amendment by Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina that called
for a stimulus package consisting only of tax cuts. Economists
whose sympathies lie with the Republicans have backed up the
cut-taxes/don't-spend approach. Robert Barro of Harvard,
speaking to the Atlantic, called the stimulus package "probably
the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s." The
government spending proposed wouldn't work as intended, he
argued. Instead, we should cut tax rates. Harvard economist
Greg Mankiw, a former Bush adviser, expressed his preference
for a stimulus that would immediately and permanently end
payroll taxes, to be offset by an increase in gas taxes.
Adherents of the tax-cuts-only strategy are suspicious of freespending Democrats, old-fashioned Keynesians, and big
government. They believe—no, they know—that tax cuts are
more efficient than government spending, since people and
businesses make better and quicker decisions about spending
than government does. And the way they read the relevant data,
history, and experience, permanently reducing long-term tax
rates has historically provided the best possible incentives to
invest and spend. They may be right. But there are also reasons
to think that what worked or made complete sense in the past
may not be as effective today. The current, somewhat
extraordinary circumstances, and the nation's changing economic
geography, should make us wonder how effective tax cuts will
be in stimulating new spending and investment.
Let's say you're a tenured professor of economics at Harvard.
You have—and have earned—a great deal of stability and
security. Your job is guaranteed, at pretty much the same salary,
until retirement. Your employer, which has been around for
more than 350 years, isn't going anywhere. The university
provides nice health care benefits and contributes generously to
a retirement plan. All of which means you can make pretty good
plans about your short- and long-term financial future. If we
reduce payroll taxes—or eliminate them entirely—the professor
will have an extra $200 in his paycheck every month. And that
might yield predictable results. Feeling slightly more flush, he
might be more likely to amble down to the Coop and buy a few
books or a V-neck Crimson sweater or to invest in a summer
home on Cape Cod. That's what a rational person would do. And
that would stimulate the economy nicely.
Back in the day, and in many of the past episodes of postwar
recession, the typical American worker resembled a Harvard
professor—not in brains or wit, to be sure, but in the shape of
her economic life. Many—not all, but a lot—enjoyed long,
relatively secure job tenures, steady incomes, and generous
employer-provided health and retirement benefits. But the
economy has changed significantly in recent decades. And the
circumstances that might prod our professor to start spending
those tax cuts immediately might not apply to everybody else.
The typical worker—white-collar, blue-collar, no-collar—
doesn't have anything like tenure or a guaranteed job. In fact, she
may be working at a company that has just laid off 10 percent of
its work force and may soon lay off more. She may be one of the
3.6 million people who has lost a job in the last year. She may
work in an industry in which one large, longtime player has just
liquidated. She might still have employer-provided health
insurance, but the company may have just jacked up the
employee contribution. She knows that if she loses her job, she
would have to start spending several thousand dollars a year to
purchase health insurance. Meanwhile, this worker—say she's in
her mid-40s—is providing for her own retirement via a 401(k),
whose balance has fallen by 40 percent in the last year. Oh, and
her adjustable-rate mortgage is about to readjust to a higher rate.
So, what happens if you cut this worker's payroll taxes
(assuming she's on somebody's payroll and isn't a contractor or
self-employed)? Well, she might spend the increased cash flow.
But given everything that's going on, a fearful but still rational
person might not rush out to spend or invest the money. She
might be far more likely—and well-advised—to save it, to build
up a cash hoard that would allow her to remain solvent should
she lose her job, or to prepare for the eventuality that she might
have to buy her own health insurance. Or she might start
shoveling that extra $100 per week into her 401(k) to make up
for some of the huge losses she's suffered.
Psychology plays a big role in all sorts of economic decisions.
And at times like these, when people are gripped with fear, it
plays an even larger role. In such a climate, cutting taxes can't
hurt. But should we expect it to have the same effect it would
have in a period when people are generally confident and
secure? If you believe the typical American worker would
respond to tax cuts the way a typical tenured Harvard economist
would, then it makes all the sense in the world to focus on tax
cuts to the exclusion of other types of stimulus. But if you
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believe the typical American worker might respond to tax cuts
the way, say, a typical Cambridge-area worker would, you might
be less sure.
moneybox
More Gloom, Please
The economic and financial crises are even worse than Obama admits.
By Daniel Gross
In the past week, the stock market reacted erratically to two huge
government actions intended to shore up economic confidence.
As this five-day chart of the Dow Jones industrial average
shows, stocks rallied last Thursday and Friday as a deal over
fiscal stimulus crystallized. The mere anticipation of the passage
of an $800 billion-plus stimulus package was enough to get
people whistling "Happy Days Are Here Again." But on
Tuesday, stocks surrendered most of those gains after Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner laid out the latest plan to stabilize the
faltering financial industry.
What accounts for bipolar response? These were twin,
aggressive efforts to deal with the woes affecting the whole
economy and the pathetic financial sector. Why would
Geithner's Treasury plan worry Wall Street while the stimulus
plan didn't? As a public speaker, Geithner is no Obama. Geithner
could learn to be more upbeat, but that wouldn't be useful.
Investors have lost faith in the financial system precisely
because policymakers and executives engaged in the classic
post-bubble reaction of promising a swift return to profitability.
(In my forthcoming e-book, Dumb Money, I dub the realization
that the titans of finance were a bunch of clueless oafs "The
Slow Unmasking.")
Geithner is realistically pessimistic about the economic crisis
while the rest of Washington—even President Obama—hasn't
caught on to how bad it is yet. From the rhetoric surrounding the
stimulus bill, you'd think the American economy is already
stabilized, able to breathe on its own, and ready to get up and
start walking. The bill itself is called the Economic Recovery
and Reinvestment Plan. Its success will be measured, Obama
noted in his press conference last night, through positive
milestones, most notably the saving or creation of 4 million jobs.
That number, which he used six times, was the justification for
the size of the package and its urgency: "It's important for us to
have a bill of sufficient size and scope that we can save or create
4 million jobs." Obama might want to retire that line, for this
reason. The takeaway: Things are tough and might get somewhat
worse. But this plan is a plan for recovery and job creation.
Geithner struck a different tone in his speech. The patient he
diagnosed is nowhere near ready for ambulatory care or physical
therapy. Rather, it's struggling to breathe without life support.
Worse, it is still in danger of infecting the whole hospital. The
financial sector, pro-cyclical on the way up—easy money begat
more easy money—is also pro-cyclical on the way down.
"Instead of catalyzing recovery, the financial system is working
against recovery," he noted.
For Geithner, the plan is more about stabilization and triage
rather than recovery. Look at the language he uses. The
initiative's Web site is FinancialStability.gov. "We're going to
require banking institutions to go through a carefully designed
comprehensive stress test, to use the medical term," Geithner
said. Merely stabilizing the patients under his care, Geithner
said, would be an expensive and lengthy process. "This strategy
will cost money, involve risk, and take time," he said. Even
when the course of treatment is complete, a recovery may still be
a long way off. "As costly as this effort may be, we know that
the cost of a complete collapse of our financial system would be
incalculable for families, for businesses and for our nation."
(Here's the fact sheet.) The takeaway: The financial sector is still
in meltdown. The best we can hope for is that these hundreds of
billions of dollars in new spending and support will help
stabilize things.
The great challenge for Obama now is that the economy at large
is beginning to resemble the financial sector. The latest readings
on job losses, auto sales, and overall economic growth show an
economy that is spiraling downward. Politicians may be hoping
that the economy is like a bungee-cord jumper, who, after
experiencing a sickening drop, experiences great relief as he
bounces back sharply. But they might want to temper the
promises they make about recovery. Many economists believe
we need a bigger stimulus package, not a smaller one. Obama's
rhetoric about recovery may be reassuring, but, at this point,
Geithner's pessimism is more credible.
Watch Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's speech about
the bailout.
sidebar
Return to article
Job growth is notoriously difficult to predict. And it's even more
difficult to identify precisely which jobs will have been created
or preserved because of any piece of legislation, such as the
stimulus package. As a matter of course, hundreds of thousands
of jobs are created and lost every month, maybe more.
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Especially in today's global economy, it's possible for the
economy at large to grow without much in the way of job
growth. The United States emerged from recession in November
2001, but as this chart shows, payroll jobs continued to decline
through 2002 and 2003. It's quite possible the U.S. economy
could emerge from recession later this year but that job losses
could continue to mount through 2010.
moneybox
Declining Declinism
Don't believe the historians and economists who say America's best days are
behind us.
By Daniel Gross
Saturday, February 7, 2009, at 7:12 AM ET
The dumb, willfully blind optimists who dominated the late
boom have slunk into exile. They've been replaced by the ardent
declinists, the bears, and the prophetic historians, armed with
copies of Gibbon and Malthus and wielding reams of data. There
are economists predicting double-digit unemployment through
2011, with the housing and stock markets reeling through 2010.
Historians, meanwhile, warn that the United States may be
losing some of its capitalistic essence as the government
increases its involvement in the financial sector. At Davos, Niall
Ferguson, a brilliant, young, Oxford-educated, Ivy Leagueemployed historian (Harvard), said the United States isn't in
another Great Depression but rather a "Great Repression," in
deep denial of its problems. The go-go Age of Leverage is over,
and a go-slow Age of Big Government has begun. High levels of
debt, imperial overreach, and heightened government influence
in the economy mean the United States is in for a Japan-style
lost decade, in which it could struggle to chart growth of 1
percent.
Economic prognostication is hamstrung by a tendency to
extrapolate from recent trends far into the future. It happens at
the top of a cycle—the Dow is going to 36,000! Housing prices
will never fall!—and it happens when we plunge into a ditch.
But haven't we heard some of this before? Twenty years ago,
another young, Oxford-educated, Ivy League-employed historian
(Yale) argued that America's best days were behind it, thanks to
imperial overreach, excessive debt, and an epic financial bust.
Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was a bestseller when it was published in 1987—and went into paperback
just as the Unites States was beginning to emerge from the Cold
War as the world's only superpower and the hub of a globally
integrated trading system.
The cry of creeping socialism has likewise echoed (falsely)
through the decades. In 1935, the day after Franklin Roosevelt
delivered a fireside chat about the need for Social Security and
other regulations, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official accused
Roosevelt of trying to "Sovietize America." The medical
profession—and Ronald Reagan*—swore up and down that the
passage of Medicare and Medicaid would transform the United
States into an English-speaking version of the USSR. Those who
fret about an era of slow socialism presume that our government
is incapable of learning from mistakes and crafting intelligent
policies. The prospect of an enhanced safety net wasn't
incompatible with growth in the 1930s and 1960s, and it isn't
now. And today, state ownership and control of private
enterprise is a temporary last resort, not an enduring governing
strategy. In Europe's social democracies, CEOs frequently
welcomed government involvement because it protected them
from competition. By contrast, U.S. managers can't wait to get
out from under the government yoke. Goldman Sachs and
Morgan Stanley have already started talking about how they plan
to pay back the bailout money before the end of this year—so
they can pay out humongous bonuses next January.
Things have been going downhill in America since the very
beginning: Imagine the economic forecasts made in Plymouth in
the bitter winter of 1619. In the early 1990s, a recession
lengthened, executives took huge paychecks while firing
thousands of workers, and Americans began to lose faith in the
capitalist systems. No economist or historian stood up and
predicted that globalization, intelligent fiscal and monetary
policy, and this thing called the Internet would launch the United
States into an unprecedented era of growth, prosperity, and
rising asset prices.
Every mutual fund or investment product comes with the caveat
that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. But
when it comes to the economy at large, nearly 400 years of
American history have shown that it can be a pretty good guide.
A version of this article appeared in Newsweek.
Correction, Feb. 12, 2009: This article originally misspelled the
last name of President Ronald Reagan. (Return to the corrected
sentence.)
movies
Confessions of a Shopaholic
A comedy that recalls the happy time when America wasn't a financial ruin.
By Dana Stevens
Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney Pictures), a petite morality
tale about consumer debt, was shot in the last few months before
a wave of tanking markets and failing banks laid waste to the
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U.S. economy. The received wisdom in Hollywood is that this
turn of fortune constituted rotten luck for the movie and its star,
Isla Fisher. ("When Will Isla Fisher Catch a Break?" moaned
Defamer.) But if Confessions of a Shopaholic weren't an
anachronism, it wouldn't have what little power it does. Last
summer, this movie would have passed unnoticed as an
undistinguished knockoff of brand-name comedies like Sex and
the City or The Devil Wears Prada. But in early 2009, as the bill
for America's own two-decade shopping binge comes due,
Confessions of a Shopaholic has the musty fascination of
something exhumed from a time capsule.
Fisher plays Rebecca Bloomwood, a journalist who loses her job
when her magazine unexpectedly folds (one of the movie's few
indicators that the publishing world is anything less than robust).
On her way to an interview at the fashion magazine Alette,
Rebecca is waylaid by an overwhelming desire to possess a
diaphanous green scarf she sees in a shop window. (A recurring
special effect in which molded plastic mannequins come to life
to tempt her with their wares is, admittedly, nifty.) The attempt
to purchase said scarf reveals two things: that Rebecca's credit
cards are maxed out—she's in debt, we soon learn, to the tune of
$16K—and that she's a compulsive shopper who can't stop
making ridiculously poor life choices. Little matter, though,
because the world has a way of forgiving Rebecca. After missing
her Alette interview, she blunders her way into a job at a
financial magazine, Successful Savings, despite a transparently
faked résumé and a salient lack of expertise about, well,
anything. This may be because of the power Rebecca's charm
exercises on Successful Savings' editor-in-chief, Luke Brandon
(Hugh Dancy). (Quick: Which is the fruitier leading-man name,
Luke Brandon or Hugh Dancy?) Rebecca is promptly given a
column of her own, in which she analyzes the world of finance
through the lens of high fashion (or something). But as the
column becomes a hit, Rebecca struggles to cover up her own
shopping addiction, piling lies on top of excuses as a persistent
creditor (Robert Stanton) stalks her—first by phone, then,
eventually, through the streets of Manhattan.
Lucky for the movie that Isla Fisher is so likable, because
Rebecca Bloomwood is a real dud of a human being: a vain,
shallow, materialistic twit who abuses the trust of both her
endlessly forgiving boss and her enabling roommate, Suze
(Krysten Ritter). The character's moral trajectory over the course
of the film makes no sense: She's rewarded over and over for
poor performance, and when her comeuppance does arrive, it's
so brief and easily overcome that the message seems to be:
When in dire financial and personal distress, charge one last cute
outfit on your credit card and lie like crazy. No one ever tells
Rebecca what she most needs to hear: that her obsession with
designer labels to the exclusion of all else is not only an unwise
spending strategy but a repellent personality trait. Perhaps to
drive home that point (or am I giving the movie too much
credit?), the costumes, designed by Sex and the City's Patricia
Field, are garishly clashing fuchsia-and-orange ensembles a-drip
with befuddling accessories. (One of Rebecca's more confusing
adornments appears to be a large square of folded felt pinned to
her lapel.) Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie wore some fugly get-ups
on Sex and the City, but at least they looked expensive. The
wardrobe that nearly puts Rebecca in the poorhouse could easily
have been ordered online from Forever 21.
Fisher's wide-eyed charm and faintly Lucille Ball-esque gift for
slapstick elevate the movie, barely, into watchable territory.
Future roles should take more advantage of Fisher's cheerful
willingness to abandon her dignity; she's game for anything,
including an amusingly klutzy dance sequence involving a
Spanish fan. Dancy, as her inexplicably bedazzled editor, is a
reasonable placeholder in the leading-man spot; given the right
material, he could be Hugh Grant, if not quite Cary Grant. But a
supporting cast of fine comic actors—Joan Cusack, John
Goodman, Kristin Scott Thomas, John Lithgow—is so
underused that they might as well be stacked in corners like
cordwood.
If you spin out the unintended analogy of Confessions of a
Shopaholic to the current financial crisis, the film starts to
mutate from a not-that-funny comedy into a tragic allegory. If
the carelessly spendthrift Rebecca is the equivalent of the
insolvent Wall Street banks, then the characters who enable her
habit—her indulgent boyfriend/boss, her infinitely patient
roommate, her eager-to-help parents—must be the proponents of
the watered-down bailout bill. In an attempt to save Rebecca
from her own mistakes, they make too many concessions and
wind up with no guarantee that she won't lie her way into hock
once again. Meanwhile, the audience, standing in for the
American taxpayer, wonders, "Why did I pony up good money
for this?"
my goodness
How To Help a Vet
Many veterans charities aren't very good. But there are other ways to aid
returning soldiers.
By Patty Stonesifer and Sandy Stonesifer
Dear Patty and Sandy,
I spent much of the past six years fulminating against the Bush
administration for putting military men and women into harm's
way and then failing to take adequate care of them upon their
return from battle. I don't think all my ranting did much to help
the actual veterans. I'm not Superman, but I probably have some
skills that could be useful to some people. If nothing else, I'm a
warm body that can schlep stuff and drive people around. How
can I do my part to help the folks who helped our nation?
48/104
—Henry From Boston
Patty:
You are right—the 1.7 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan
deserve our support. But supporting returning veterans is clearly
the responsibility of the U.S. government—and the first action
you should take is to encourage the government to support
veterans with the basic homecoming, health care, education, and
social service benefits they need and deserve.
There is some good news on this front. The 2008 passage of the
new GI Bill, modeled on the best aspects of the post-WWII
program, will dramatically improve post-9/11 veterans' ability to
get the education they want after military service. It never would
have passed without active citizens pushing it forward; even
YouTube played a role. But many other aspects of veterans'
services are not in good shape. Mental health needs are woefully
underfunded at a time when both suicide and PTSD are on the
rise among vets, the Veterans Affairs health system is
overloaded, and jobs are tough to find.
Afghanistan Veterans has a great list of volunteer opportunities,
ranging from organizing gift packs to helping transport injured
vets to medical appointments. There are also several VA
Hospitals in the Boston area, with volunteer opportunities
similar to those in other hospitals. With all the time you used to
spend fulminating, you should be able to make a real difference
in a vet's life.
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.
other magazines
On Jan. 20, the Senate committee on veterans' affairs held its
first hearing of 2009 and invited top veterans organizations to
present their concerns. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of
America listed its top legislative priorities, including
professional mental-health and brain-injury screening for all
incoming and outgoing military personnel, cutting the VA
claims backlog in half, supporting veterans' training and
employment needs, and addressing homelessness and
foreclosures among veterans. You can educate yourself on these
issues and take action by joining the IAVA supporters network
and receiving bulletins on legislation affecting veterans.
Sandy:
Usually my mom talks about using your time, your money, and
your voice to help the causes you believe in. In most cases, all
three can be equally effective, but unfortunately veterans
charities have a bad reputation for inefficiency. They are two
times more likely to hire professional fundraising companies,
which means significantly less of your money goes to those in
need. So I would recommend focusing on your time and your
voice for this one. If you're committed to giving money, be extra
careful to make sure the organization is reputable. And never
give money to a phone solicitor without doing your research
first, even if they pull on your patriotic heartstrings. A good
place to start that research is Charity Navigator's recently
published list of the best- and worst-rated veterans charities.
As my mom said, advocating for better long-term services is
crucial, but legislation can be slow, and there are more veterans
coming home every day. So how can you use your time to help
those immediately in need? The Coalition for Iraq and
Are We Socialist?
Newsweek and the Weekly Standard on big government.
By David Sessions
Newsweek, Feb. 16
The cover story argues that America has become more socialist
than we'd like to admit, and, irony of ironies, much of it
happened under a Republican president. We're still a "centerright" nation that distrusts big government, the authors write, but
we're also attached to the perks that come with it. The U.S.
government spends only 8 percentage points less of its country's
annual GDP than its peers in the euro zone—we spent 39.9
percent; they spent 47.1 percent—and, over the next few years,
"we will become even more French." … An article explains why
Americans don't hate the rich but prefer to laugh at them instead.
While ire at the wealthy has surfaced during times of economic
distress, "what Americans lack is what the European working
classes gleefully exhibit: resentment of the rich personally." That
might be because the United States began without an aristocracy,
and obtaining wealth has been traditionally seen as a positive
measure of an individual's personal qualities.
Weekly Standard, Feb. 16
An article observes that "the state has never been more in
vogue." The stimulus bill, the author writes, is only a "down
payment" on social programs, with much more spending to
come. Government clearly has a role in solving problems, but
the current one is too caught up in its own groupthink to foresee
the swift retribution when its grand ideas fail: "Democrats are
49/104
marching lockstep down a road that has been trod before, with
nary a thought of the consequences." … An article reports on the
post-election mood on the streets of Baghdad. The "drama-free"
vote was a great success for Iraq and a relief for the United
States, but making sense of it isn't easy. Encouragingly, the
Iraqis the author interviewed "clearly saw themselves—and this
is a first in Iraqi history—as the people's guardians."
New York, Feb. 16
The cover story follows geek-comedian Demetri Martin as he
finishes up the first episodes for his upcoming Comedy Central
show Important Things With Demetri Martin. A law school
dropout turned comic, Martin creates his one-man performances
from a whimsical mix of one-liners ("Drummers are cool. Until
you put them in a circle"), drawings, simple songs, and displays
of ambidexterity. He's written two commissioned sitcoms that
went unproduced, but his new show attempts to re-create his
cultishly popular "handmade" stage aesthetic. … An article finds
a young survivor of the dot-com bubble visiting Twitter
headquarters in San Francisco and declaring that the company's
founders might be living in the last tech "dream world" on the
planet. As an economic storm rages around them, the "Twitter
boys" are taking their time, insisting that Twitter is "the triumph
of the human spirit" and that, when the time is right, "the money
will come."
The New Yorker, Feb. 9 and 16
An article examines Beyoncé's "fierceness," observing that her
brilliant, strange musical career has been executed without
"cursing, committing infidelity, or breaking any laws, even in
character." The fierceness already in her repertoire, particularly
in her sassy performances with Destiny's Child, makes her
experiments with a fictional alter ego, "Sasha Fierce," peculiar.
But as she proved singing in Etta James during the Obamas' first
dance, she's "really good at being good," and that's all anyone
notices. … An article downplays the importance of moral
hazard, the idea that people act more rashly when insulated from
the consequences. It seems like common sense, but policy driven
by moral hazard—letting Lehman Bros. fail, for example—
sometimes produces unforeseen problems. And there are many
situations in which the "insulation" doesn't affect behavior, like a
messy bailout that investors and regulators alike would rather
not go through. … An article slams this year's Oscar nominees,
which beat out "more deserving movies."
Foreign Policy, January/February 2009
An article by Condoleezza Rice's former speechwriter describes
Bush's second-term foreign policy as "pragmatic
internationalism based on enduring national interests and ideals
for a country whose global leadership is still indispensable."
Obama ran against a "caricature of Bush's first term," but his
foreign policy is more likely to mirror what happened in the
second. "Obama will inherit a Middle East peace process finally
proceeding on both tracks at once"—state-building and
peacemaking—and probably won't find a good reason to change
course much. … An article argues that climate change is
happening more quickly than even scientists admit, and that we
have missed our chance to "solve" the crisis. Projections have
human activity raising the global temperature by 5 degrees
Fahrenheit in the next century, and 1 degree of increase has
already wreaked havoc. … An exhaustive list ranks the best
national and international think tanks.
poem
"It Takes Particular Clicks"
By Christian Wiman
Tuesday, February 10, 2009, at 7:00 AM ET
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Christian Wiman
read this poem. You can also download the recording or
subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
Flip-flops, leash-clinks,
spit on the concrete
like a light slap:
our dawn goon
ambles past, flexing
his pit bull. And soft,
and soon, a low burn
lights the flight path
from O'Hare,
slowly the sky
a roaring flue
to heaven
slowly shut.
Here's a curse
for a car door
stuck for the umpteenth
time, here a rake
for next door's nut
to claw and claw
at nothing. My nature
is to make
of the speedbump
scraping the speeder's
undercarriage,
and the om
of traffic, and somewhere
the helicopter
hovering over
snarls—a kind
of clockwork
from which all things
50/104
seek release,
but it takes
particular clicks
to pique my poodle's
interest, naming
with her nose's
particular quiver
the unseeable
unsayable
squirrel. Good girl.
.
politics
Stimulate First, Ask Questions Later
With the stimulus bill, Obama chose urgency over transparency.
enough to get us out of the depot. The time for transparency is
when a decision is being made, not after it has been issued. Once
a piece of legislation has been agreed to, or a project has been
put in motion, pointing to a Web site doesn't create much moral
pressure to undo the deed.
But don't take my word for it. Here's what Barack Obama's very
own Web site says about transparency in legislative
negotiations:
End the Practice of Writing Legislation
Behind Closed Doors: As president, Barack
Obama will restore the American people's trust
in their government by making government
more open and transparent. Obama will work
to reform congressional rules to require all
legislative sessions, including committee
mark-ups and conference committees, to be
conducted in public.
By John Dickerson
Pointing out this contradiction is not going to undo the bill.
For President Obama to get a stimulus bill, something had to
give. You can have urgency or transparency or a thorough think
about things. But you can't have all three. Forced to choose,
Obama chose the fierce urgency of now.
The other victim of urgency is considered thought (which also
can't be recovered by a Web site). There's been lots of debate
about what to add or subtract from the bill to get a deal. But
that's horse-trading, not consideration. In the rush to get the
votes, discussions about national priorities on education,
technology, and transportation have happened at warp speed.
The president heralded a deal reached Wednesday in the House
and Senate on a stimulus bill, but the process wasn't pretty.
Creating legislation often isn't. Instead of finding a Lego piece
that fits, lawmakers get a larger one and bite it in half. Never
mind the jagged edges.
In this case, not only is the end product ragged—some of the
elements aren't terribly stimulative—but the means were ugly.
The differences between the House and Senate bills were
reconciled mostly in secret by House and Senate Democratic
leaders, three Northeastern Republicans, and White House aides.
This is hardly unusual for Washington—which is precisely the
problem: It's not the change Obama promised.
Obama promised his administration would be so transparent that
its deliberations would be shown on C-SPAN. Had cameras
recorded negotiations on the stimulus bill, it would have looked
like a scene from Animal Crackers. As Jeff Zeleny reported, the
stimulus deal was so opaque even the people negotiating it
weren't in on what was in it.
Obama and his aides are quick to point out that the stimulus bill
includes transparency provisions. So maybe we shouldn't worry.
There's going to be a Web site, www.recovery.gov, which will
allow people to make sure the money from the stimulus bill is
being spent wisely. That's fine as far as it goes. But that isn't far
True, there has been a lot of public debate about what is and isn't
stimulative, and the president himself spent an hour patiently
teaching the country the other night about the bill. But he was
talking more about the need for urgency than any particular part
of the stimulus package. And in the rush to get a deal, some
barely stimulative provisions have gotten into the bill. The
alternative minimum tax fix is a large example. At $70 billion,
it's not a small part of the bill, but it's an anemic stimulus. Other
stuff would probably be better.
The argument against transparency, of course, is that the perfect
can't be the enemy of the good. That's eminently reasonable and
realistic. It's an expression we've heard often as the negotiations
have come to a close. Something always has to fall out of
legislation. In this case it was transparency and consideration.
Whether they've fallen out of the young Obama administration,
too, is something we'll have to figure out in less urgent times.
politics
Man of Steele
Is Michael Steele Barack Obama's evil twin?
51/104
By Christopher Beam
Evil twin, nemesis, archenemy—whatever the term, every great
protagonist has one. Superman had Bizarro, his alternateuniverse self. Spock from Star Trek had the shady, goateed
"mirror" Spock. Super Mario has the cackling Wario.
And Barack Obama has Michael Steele.
Evil twins have certain identifying characteristics. For one thing,
they lead parallel existences. Obama and Steele are roughly the
same age—Obama is 47, Steele is 50. They were both rising
stars in their respective state parties. And they both now lead
their respective national parties. But whereas Obama was
blessed with supreme good fortune—he won his first state
Senate race on a ballot technicality, and his opponent for U.S.
Senate was Alan Keyes—Steele was less lucky. A Republican in
a Democratic state, he chose the worst year possible to run for
Senate: 2006. And while Obama cruised through the cesspool of
Chicago politics with hardly an ethical blemish, Steele is now
fighting accusations that he misspent campaign funds. (Steele
called the allegations "not true.")
Evil twins also tend to have inverted moralities—or, in this case,
politics. Whereas Obama favors government spending in the
stimulus bill, Steele supports tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.
"Individual empowerment—that's how you stimulate the
economy," he says. On social issues, Steele has been reliably
conservative, with the occasional exception. "I am
philosophically the polar opposite of the man," Steele said of
Obama in 2008.
And as the term would suggest, evil twins look similar but
usually have distinctive physical differences—an eye patch, say,
or a scar. Michael Steele, like Barack Obama, is AfricanAmerican. But unlike Obama, he is bald and sports a
mustache—a classic nemesis signifier, although a goatee would
be ideal.
But those are just the circumstantial similarities. In recent weeks,
Steele has made what seems like a concerted effort to fashion
himself as the anti-Obama. Obama is calm under fire and
seemingly unflappable. Steele delights in stirring things up.
"How do you like me now?" he said during his victory speech—
a seeming challenge to Obama. When the stimulus bill passed
the House with zero Republican votes, Steele congratulated GOP
members of Congress: "The goose egg that you laid on the
president's desk was just beautiful," he said.
Steele has also made himself the anti-Obama in a rhetorical
sense. They're both charismatic speakers. But Obama can get
bogged down in details—a tendency on display at his wonk-
tastic first White House press conference. He can also get so
carried away with digressions and qualifications that you forget
where he started. Steele has no such problem. "You and I know
that in the history of mankind and womankind, government—
federal, state or local—has never created one job," he told House
Republicans in January. He repeated the point to George
Stephanopoulos on Sunday, saying that jobs created by the
government aren't even jobs—they're "just work." If Obama's
weakness is nuance, Steele's is the utter lack thereof.
The twin-ness even carries over to the way the two men view
their race. During his campaign, with the notable exception of
his "race speech" in Philadelphia, Obama made a concerted
effort not to make his race an issue. He made the historic nature
of his candidacy implicit. Steele has a trickier job. One of the
reasons he was elected party chairman is his ability to reach out
to minorities. So in a way his job is to emphasize his
background. But sometimes it comes off weirdly. After Steele
called Obama's stimulus package "a wish list from a lot of
people who have been on the sidelines for years, to get a little
bling, bling," Gawker declared: "The Republicans have finally
found their voice: it's the voice of a 50-year-old using hiphop
slang from the end of the '90s." Obama's hip-hop references are
from at least 2003.
None of this, of course, is to say that Michael Steele is evil. In
fact, "evil" twins sometimes turn out to be good. Or the "evil"
one and the "good" one team up. Or we simply learn that the
world is complicated and tolerates many reasonable, if clashing,
perspectives. Whatever the result, Republicans have done a
remarkable job at picking the perfect foil to lead the charge
against Obama. Although he really should grow a goatee.
politics
Michelle Obama Steps Out
The first lady takes her first solo trip in the neighborhood.
By John Dickerson
"I was raised to believe that when you get, you give back,"
Michelle Obama told a group of 13 high school students
Tuesday afternoon. She was visiting Mary's Center, a
community health organization in the Adams Morgan
neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The kids wanted to know
why she'd made the milelong trip north. "We were taught you
have to get to know the community you're in, and you have to be
a part of that community. … Barack is real busy right now, so I
figured I've got the time on my hands and while the kids are in
school, I figured I would come out and hear about programs and
meet students."
52/104
She described all of this as if the man she called Barack were an
ambitious accountant, not the guy who the night before had
given a prime-time press conference in the East Room of the
White House.
But Michelle Obama wasn't just there to talk about the power of
community outreach. She was offering herself as a symbol. "I
was somewhat where you are," she told the kids. "I didn't come
to this position with a lot of wealth and a lot of resources. I think
it's real important for young kids, particularly kids who come
from communities without resources, to see me. Not the first
lady, but to see that there is no magic to me sitting here. There
are no miracles that happen. There is no magic dust that was
sprinkled on my head or Barack's head. We were kids much like
you who figured out one day that our fate was in our own hands.
We made decisions to listen to our parents and work hard, and
work even harder when somebody doubted us. When somebody
told me I couldn't do something, that gave me a greater
challenge to prove them wrong. … Every little challenge like
that and every little success, I gained more confidence, and life
just sort of opened up. So I feel like it's an obligation for me to
share that with you."
In her hourlong visit, Obama talked a little about her husband's
stimulus package and efforts to build strong schools. But she
was hardly a wonk. At one point she fumbled for the correct
description of the S-CHIP program Obama had just signed into
law. She wasn't pitching, she was collecting data. "What would
you tell the nation, because they're all listening," she said, noting
the cameras and reporters in the room. "What would you tell the
president, because I might talk to him tonight."
When it came to talking about personal responsibility, the first
lady's pitch was identical to her husband's. "That's the difference
between being a kid and an adult," she said, describing the call
to get involved in a community. "It's not the money you make or
the degree that you have but it's the choice that you make to be
active and involved and a responsible citizen, and no president
can mandate that, no mayor can mandate that. It comes from us,
our faith, our belief in one another. It's not just what I need and
who is going to give it to me, but what can I do? What kind of
citizen am I going to be? What kind of parent am I going to be?
What kind of neighbor am I going to be? And what am I going
to do the next time a crime is committed? Am I going to walk
by? Do I call the police? Do I get involved? That is all part of
the conversation we need to have as a society."
Before sitting with the teenagers, the first lady read to nine
preschool children. "What's going on?" she asked when she
entered the windowless classroom filled with art projects,
hanging valentines, and big block letters of the alphabet. "Hello,
little people."
The little people were happy, but not excessively so. She had
not, after all, brought candy. Or maybe they were unnerved by
all the flashes from the cameras.
"My name is Michelle, and I'm married to the president of the
United States. Do you know his name?"
"Barack Obama," said a 5-year-old girl named Anais, who
became the star of the show. She also knew the Obama
daughters' names and several other pieces of information. (She
was silent, however, on the stimulus bill.)
The first lady took her seat but quickly moved onto the purple
rug to get closer to the kids. She asked each child his or her
name, getting down to eye level. Two young boys were reluctant
to interact. One, David, was playing with cars. "What about you
with the cars?" she said in mock irritation. "Hey! You with the
cars?" David didn't respond. She grabbed his shoe, which also
had a car on it. "You have cars everywhere," she said.
The first lady started reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What
Do You See?, which she seemed to know by heart. It's a simple
tale of animals and colors in which each animal sees the next
one. The kids read along with her through pictures of a yellow
duck and a blue horse, and when it came time for the purple cat,
she said "meow" and so did the kids. Next, she turned the page
to the white dog. "Where are my dogs at?" she asked, taking the
standard first lady's grammatical license. Everyone barked.
When Obama got to the fish, there was some confusion about
the color. Was it gold or orange? She surveyed the crowd. "Lets
make a team decision." A child insisted it was orange.
"OK, let's call it orange," she said. "You made a compelling
case."
Obama was handed another book. She passed because the book
was in Spanish.
"You don't know Spanish?" asked a child.
Before leaving, the first lady posed for photographs and signed a
poster for the center. "Always think about where you came from
and what you're going to give back," she told the students on the
way out. The kids, who were a slightly quiet bunch, didn't
immediately respond. "Sound right?" she asked them, a little
pointedly. They all said yes.
"No, and it's ridiculous," she responded.
Then the first lady called for hugs. Most of the children
complied. The cameras went nuts. This might have made a few
kids reluctant.
53/104
"More, more, more," she said. To the reluctant ones, she asked:
"Whatcha, leaving me hanging?" Eventually they all piled on. It
was, in the end, a group hug.
politics
Professor Obama's First Seminar
The president ran his prime-time press conference like a grad-school class.
By John Dickerson
The East Room of the White House has to be the fanciest room
in which Professor Obama has ever held class. But for an hour
Monday night, he didn't seem to notice as he held a graduate
seminar on the first 20 days of his administration with all of the
methodical procedure and pizzazz he might have applied to
teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law
School.
The performance was systematic, commanding, at times
belabored, and a test of a new kind of political communication.
Obama hoped to use the press conference to keep the pressure on
Congress to enact his stimulus bill. He talked of urgency, but
there was nothing urgent about the evening. That's wonderful, in
a way. We want people with low blood pressure in high-pressure
jobs. But as a political act of theater—and that's what a press
conference is, in part—the questions coming out of Obama's
colloquium are whether he created the sense of urgency he was
aiming for and whether he characterized his opponents as
powerfully and acutely as necessary to reframe the debate on his
terms. If the president's job is to persuade, can it be done through
patient instruction with only a few hints of harangue?
It was Barack Obama's first big press conference as president, so
you might have expected a little flap in his unflappability. We
know he can do the big speeches, but he had only one mildly
high-pressure press conference during the campaign, so he hadn't
had much practice. And the East Room is the kind of room that
can make a person nervous, or at least jittery. It's the White
House's biggest room, and the décor seeks to achieve the same
effect as the playing of "Hail to the Chief." Yellow curtains
swoop on for nearly 20 feet, the walls are interrupted every few
inches with molding, and from the ceiling hang gold-and-crystal
chandeliers the size of Mini Coopers. As if that weren't enough
to make Obama take a few short breaths, every person, camera,
chair, and boom mike was aimed at him. Even Ronald Reagan,
who knew a thing or two about performing in front of an
audience, confused the Mediterranean and Caribbean in his first
press conference (just as one member of the press confused Iran
and Vietnam).
But from the moment Obama took a quick hop up to his place
behind the lectern, his hands never shook and never fidgeted. A
piece of paper got stuck to his sleeve during his prepared
remarks, but he carried on, acting as if it were just a big cufflink.
When foreign journalists yelled and tried to get his attention, he
paid no mind. (Quaint that they thought serendipity might be
involved in an East Room press conference. Obama had a
prepared map before him with the names of journalists he was
going to call on and their seat numbers, so he knew where to
look.) As the first question was asked, the teleprompter screens
the president had used for his opening remarks descended into
their housing. This was not normal and certainly hasn't happened
in an East Room press conference before, but Obama's face took
no note of the event as he fielded the question.
Obama reacted to the high-pressure environment by spinning
answers that were thorough and bullet-pointed (if not quite
bulletproof) to questions related to his stimulus package, the
second round of bank bailouts, Afghanistan, and Iran. At times
his answers were like geometric shapes in which he touched all
sides of the hexagon. Answering a question about Iran, he
complimented its people, chided Iran for being "unhelpful,"
warned about a nuclear weapon, and offered the possibility of
diplomatic overtures. But Obama reminded us that lots of
mistrust had built up over the years, so no one should expect
anything to happen quickly, then he reiterated his "deep
concerns" but offered the possibility of mutual respect and called
on Iran to send the right signals.
After Obama's first answer about the stimulus bill went on for
nearly eight minutes, a journalist to my right joked that the
president would conclude by saying, "and good night."
Obama is not excessively didactic—though he did correct one
reporter's characterization of the role of excessive consumer
spending in the economic collapse. He's orderly. This is in great
contrast to his predecessor, who sometimes spoke in small
colloquial bursts. Those who found that to be George W. Bush's
most irritating quality have probably already watched Obama
again on TiVo for the delight of hearing a string of complete
sentences. There may also be another group of people who tuned
in or will see the sound bites from the press conference on
Tuesday and will be reminded that they like Obama's moderate,
careful tone and find that reason enough to give him more
support for his big new program. But if Obama wanted to create
urgency to get Congress to act or to spur people to call their
representatives and demand action to avoid economic
catastrophe, he didn't really do it. The only time he appeared to
show emotion was in answering a question about flag-draped
coffins. He said signing letters to the families of "slain heroes"
had brought the weight of his job most powerfully home to
him.*
54/104
Another of Obama's goals for the evening was to frame his
opponents, which he did frequently. They are "playing politics
instead of solving problems," he said.
He was probably more effective in this gambit, if for no other
reason than some of these quotes will be replayed over the next
24 hours. The attacks are still disingenuous, though. Obama
suggests that the bulk of his opponents don't want to do anything
at all. This makes them look absurd. It's true that some people
hold this view. But the bulk of his opponents believe in some
stimulus bill, just not the one he proposed. This is a perfectly
standard political trick, but it's hard to pull off if you're a
president promising a new kind of politics.
Obama and his aides also flirted with another old-style trick.
Republicans during the last administration used to frame
principled opposition to policy as ignorance of the problem the
policy was supposed to solve. If you didn't like the Patriot Act,
then you were soft on terrorism. In the argument over the
stimulus bill, Obama and his aides often characterize those who
oppose it as narrow Washington thinkers who don't know what's
really happening in the country. As Obama's press secretary
Robert Gibbs put it Monday: "There's a myopic viewpoint in
Washington. And I think Washington needs to understand what
happens in Florida, and Indiana, and Michigan, and Ohio, and
Pennsylvania." It could also be true that lawmakers get it but just
think there's a different answer.
As the president answered the last question of the night, he
finally shifted his weight off his two feet, which had been
planted for nearly an hour. He crossed one behind the other—
relaxing a little, perhaps, because he knew he had helped his
case for the stimulus bill without flubbing or because he had
covered all of the material on time. He waved and turned to walk
down the red carpet at 9 p.m., exactly an hour after he'd begun.
Correction, Feb. 11, 2009: The article originally and incorrectly
said that Barack Obama said the hardest part of his job was
writing letters to the families of fallen servicemembers. That was
not the case. Obama talked about signing such letters and said
they had brought the weight of his office home to him. (Return to
the corrected sentence.)
politics
Gang Signs
Why Sens. Collins, Snowe, and Specter can do whatever they want.
By Christopher Beam
powerless and have nowhere to turn are increasingly joining
gangs. Welcome to the U.S. Senate.
First there was the Gang of Six Republican moderates who
challenged Ronald Reagan on environmental and health issues.
Then there was the Gang of Seven GOP members of the House
who spoke out against the House banking scandal in the early
1990s. The bipartisan Gang of 14 intervened in the Senate when
Republicans threatened to use the "nuclear option" to abolish the
filibuster in 2005. Now, as Obama looks for Republican support
for his stimulus bill, there is a Gang of Three.
After weeks of partisan gridlock, Sens. Olympia Snowe and
Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Sen. Arlen Specter of
Pennsylvania were the only Republicans in either chamber to
vote for the stimulus bill Monday evening. That was after
hashing out a compromise last Friday that lopped $110 billion
off the $900 billion package.
Their stated reasons for supporting the bill sound a lot like
Obama's. "The country cannot afford not to take action," Specter
wrote in Monday's Washington Post. Collins spoke of the need
to "jump-start our economy." Snowe has been quieter, but
Democrats counted on her support: "Olympia Snowe anchors
this agreement. She is a rock," said Sen. Max Baucus, who
chairs the finance committee.
But their support is also the result of particular electoral,
ideological, and strategic circumstances. For starters, they had
more to fear if they voted against the bill. Specter is up for reelection in 2010 in a state that voted decisively for Obama.
Snowe and Collins aren't up until 2012 and 2014, respectively,
but Maine also leans Democratic, and they have long been
moderate on economic issues.
Ideologically, the three senators could easily be Democrats.
Specter has broken with his party often, most conspicuously on
funding for stem-cell research. Snowe fought hard in 2003
against Bush's $700 billion in tax cuts. Collins was one of three
Republicans to oppose the ban on so-called partial-birth
abortions. Both Snowe and Collins have supported labor rights
provisions in free-trade agreements, and both voted to acquit Bill
Clinton during his Senate trial. It's no surprise that these
Republicans would be the first to break off.
There's also the pork factor. The White House estimates that the
stimulus would create or save 16,000 jobs in Maine, plus a
potential $150 million for schools to offset costs of renovations
(although that provision may get axed during negotiations). In
Pennsylvania, the bill would create or save more than 150,000
jobs. All three senators are known for fiscal restraint, but a local
boost during tough times can't hurt.
News flash: Vulnerable American men and women who feel
55/104
But perhaps the strongest incentive is raw, unalloyed power.
Senators already have a lot of it—they serve long terms, they
craft the national agenda, they can put a hold on any bill. But
that power is magnified in the ideological center, especially
when the vote count is close. With Democrats controlling 58
seats in the Senate—59 if Al Franken ends up winning
Minnesota—the importance of a single Republican is huge.
Magnifying it further is the "survivorship bias" of the
Republican caucus. Many moderate members of Congress were
voted out of office in 2006 and 2008, leaving the caucus more
conservative overall. Because the number of swingable
Republicans is smaller, each one is more powerful. (They must
already feel the difference: Last week, Obama welcomed all
three to the Oval Office for one-on-one chats.)
Best of all for the gang, there's little consequence for breaking
ranks. Republicans won't punish the three defectors for the same
reason Obama didn't punish Joe Lieberman when he strayed
during the 2008 campaign. They need them. Centrists are useful
for squeezing compromises out of the majority—the gang
persuaded Senate Democrats to cut spending on school nutrition,
energy-efficient federal buildings, and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. The closer the Dems are to
reaching 60, the more willing they are to compromise. And if
Republicans ever lost both their senators from Maine, they'd be
in even worse shape.
Sure, the vote might hurt the Gang of Three among conservative
Republicans. But it's not as if they had much support there
anyway. "These Republicans have never been known as part of
the core of the party," says GOP strategist Alex Castellanos,
referring to Snowe and company. "If they have Blue Dog
Democrats, we have Red Cat Republicans. These are the Red
Cat Republicans." Nor does Grover Norquist smile on their
fiscal apostasy.
Still, any beating their image may take among hard-core
Republicans is outweighed by popular opinion. A Gallup poll
released Monday says that 67 percent of Americans approve of
Obama's handling of the bill, as opposed to 31 percent who favor
the work of Republicans. Whatever slip-ups the new
administration has made, the watchword is still bipartisanship.
Even Republicans who oppose the stimulus say they want
bipartisan solutions. By actually sitting down, hashing out a
compromise, and voting on it, the Gang of Three can claim that
mantle.
There's a decent chance the Gang of Three will expand. Sen.
George Voinovich of Ohio favors a stimulus but opposes the
Democrats' approach. Other moderate members of the GOP, in
both chambers, may get onboard when the House, Senate, and
White House work out compromise legislation later this week.
But whatever happens, Collins, Snowe, and Specter have staked
out their turf. They're the go-to gang.
press box
How To Speak Obama
Zadie Smith's two cents on how 44 mesmerizes.
By Jack Shafer
When Barack Obama speaks, novelist Zadie Smith hears in him
Whitman-esque multitudes. Part of Obama's oratorical appeal—
as she explains in a December speech printed in the current New
York Review of Books—is his ability to voice almost anybody,
which he repeatedly demonstrates in his autobiography Dreams
From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. She writes:
Obama can do young Jewish male, black old
lady from the South Side, white woman from
Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds,
black Columbia nerds, activist women,
churchmen, security guards, bank tellers. …
He can even do the 40-ish British traveler
named Mr. Wilkerson, whom he remembers
looking up at the night sky in Africa and
saying, "I believe that's the Milky Way."
Obama's gift—or skill—isn't mimicry. "He can speak them,"
Smith writes, because he possesses an ear that can really hear
them, the way that George Bernard Shaw heard the variants of
English and captured them for the page.
Smith points to the comic dialogue from Dreams From My
Father to illustrate his linguistic dexterity. Earlier this month,
the Boston Phoenix made the same point in a different fashion
by ripping some funny, slangy dialogue from the Obama-read
audiobook edition of Dreams and putting them online. Playing
these MP3s against, say, the recording of his first presidential
press conference, you begin to appreciate his range. "Sure you
can have my number, baby," "Blam!," and profanity-laced clips
culled by the Phoenix pulse with both humor and gravity.
If Obama were just an impressionist, his attempts to capture
regional dialects or ethnic accents on the campaign stump would
educe mostly laughter. But he gets away with speaking about
Main Street in Iowa and sweet potato pie in Northwest Philly by
"carefully tailoring his intonations to suit the sensibility of his
listeners," Smith writes. Sometimes he fuses separate argots in a
single sentence, as Smith illustrates with this speech snippet:
We worship an awesome God in the blue
states, and we don't like federal agents poking
around our libraries in the red states.
56/104
When Obama says awesome God, Smith writes that she
visualizes a Georgia church. When he says poking around, she
envisions a South Bend, Ind., kitchen table conversation. Obama
maintains a balance, Smith writes, that is "perfect, cunningly
counterpoised and never accidental."
She continues: "It's only now that it's over that we see him let his
guard down a little, on 60 Minutes, say, dropping in that
culturally, casually black construction 'Hey, I'm not stupid, man,
that's why I'm president,' something it's hard to imagine him
doing even three weeks earlier."
Obama's code-switching doesn't stop at speech. Obama can
march to a podium as stiff-necked as an insurance salesman and
stand as rigidly as a Ken doll, if that's what the moment calls for.
Making a speech, he understands the communications magic
contained in thrusting your arms down, just as they teach at
Toastmasters International. If he needs to command respect
during a press conference, he's good at posing as a professor
leading a graduate seminar. He can play the gentleman,
gracefully rebounding after a debate opponent spurns his offer to
shake hands. Or if payback is due, he's just as adept at quoting
from a Jay-Z video, insulting Hillary Clinton with a brushinghis-shoulders-off move. Whether wheeling down a basketball
court in Indiana or bowling like a two-left-legged doofus in
Pennsylvania, he knows how to radiate physical authenticity.
He's the anti-Nixon.
In Smith's thinking, Obama comes close to being both Eliza
Doolittle and Henry Higgins—the student as worldly selfinstructor who has studied in Hawaii, Kenya, Kansas, Indonesia,
Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge, and other points.
Citing Pygmalion, Smith notes that a lost accent usually signifies
some sort of betrayal. "We feel that our voices are who we are,
and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a
voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced
duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls."
Thanks to reader Jim Milstein for alerting me to the Zadie Smith
piece. But what have the rest of you done for me lately? Send
tips to [email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by
name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or
elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent
disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time
Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of
errors in this specific column, type the word Zadie in the subject
head of an e-mail message, and send it to
[email protected].
press box
To Catch a War Criminal?
Why is NBC being so cagey about its new series?
By Jack Shafer
The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, Inside Higher Ed, and
other outlets reported last week that Goucher College had
suspended Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting professor from
Rwanda, after learning of genocide charges brought against him
in Rwanda.
Goucher President Sanford J. Ungar explains in an open letter
that the charges—which Munyakazi denies—were brought to his
attention in December by "a producer from NBC News …
working on a series about international war criminals who are
living in the United States." The producer was accompanied by a
Rwandan prosecutor, Ungar adds.
A network series about hunting for war criminals among us?
"How can the man who passes between culturally black and
white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest
man?" Smith asks. In public life, toggling your identity is
ordinarily a binary process: The new identity cancels the other.
Obama's trick has been to make additive what is ordinarily
subtractive, and do it convincingly. Smith answers her own
question, concluding:
The tale [Obama] tells is not the old tragedy of
gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a
true one. The tale he tells is all about addition.
His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced
man. If it has a moral it is that each man must
be true to his selves, plural.
******
Sounds strange to my ears—and to those of Ungar, a former
journalist and one-time dean of American University's School of
Communications. In his open letter, Ungar continues: "Some
question the unusual circumstance in which the prosecutor
traveled around the United States with a television producer and
camera crew, rather than talking with the appropriate U.S.
government officials through standard channels."
Hoping to learn more about the series, I contacted NBC News,
but a spokesman said that NBC News makes it a "policy not to
comment on our newsgathering." An NBC News producer
working on the series, Adam Ciralsky, also declined to answer
questions, referring them to corporate communications. Also
working on the program is Charlie Ebersol, whom I tried to
contact but failed.
57/104
Ciralsky is a successful producer at NBC News who won a 2006
George Polk Award for network television reporting. Ebersol
has credits on several documentary films, including one that
aired on HBO about South African students, another about
snowboarder Shaun White, and another about Notre Dame
football. NBC News says Ebersol is not an employee but that it
has contracted with his documentary company for the war
criminal project. Charlie Ebersol's father is Dick Ebersol,
chairman of NBC Sports.
According to news reports, Munyakazi was arrested for
overstaying his visa and faces deportation. But Ungar states in
his open letter that "evidence that would either convict or
exonerate Dr. Munyakazi [of the genocide charges] beyond a
reasonable doubt simply does not exist at this time, or, if it does,
I have not seen it."
Munyakazi argues against the genocide charges in this Baltimore
Sun piece. Alison Des Forges, a senior adviser for Human Rights
Watch's Africa division who was brought in by Ungar to review
the charges against Munyakazi, also contests them in the Inside
Higher Ed article.
While it's true that Munyakazi appears on Interpol's "Red
Notice" wanted list, a "Red Notice" is not an international arrest
warrant. In Munyakazi's case, it basically means that Rwandan
authorities issued a warrant for his arrest that passed muster with
Interpol. As Slate's Daniel Engber noted in 2006, Interpol once
issued a "Red Notice" for Benazir Bhutto at Pakistan's behest.
Ungar's letter states that the NBC series is scheduled for a
February or March air date, which means we'll soon know what
sort of dossier Ciralsky and Ebersol have on Munyakazi—and a
whole lot more about what kind of journalism they're practicing.
Addendum, 9:11 p.m.: Brian Stelter of the New York Times
explains it all in a just-posted story. Terrific work.
******
If you know more about NBC's war criminals project, drop me a
line: [email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by
name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or
elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent
disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time
Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of
errors in this specific column, type the word Rwanda in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
[email protected].
recycled
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates,
Unplugged
Allen C. Guelzo's book strips away the nostalgia around this classic encounter.
By David Greenberg
Feb. 12 is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. To
mark the occasion, Slate is recycling previous articles about the
16th president of the United States. Reprinted below is a 2008
"History Lesson" by David Greenberg on the Lincoln-Douglas
senatorial debates.
Cynics love to groan about presidential debates. The historic
1960 encounters between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy,
though now swathed in myth, gave rise to gripes that those
political quiz shows weren't true debates but merely joint press
conferences. And ever since general-election debates resumed in
1976, the same critique has appeared each cycle. The candidates,
we're reminded, don't think spontaneously so much as
regurgitate excerpts from their stump speeches or recite canned
jokes. Self-important moderators degrade the discourse with
gotcha questions, bullying candidates into irresponsible pledges
or making them look evasive if they dare to stand their ground.
Afterward, the usual cast of blowhards sets to work ignoring all
but a few sound bites while dwelling on—and thus
influencing—the question of who comes out ahead.
The Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates of 1858—the seven
three-hour-long contests conducted around Illinois by Democrat
Stephen A. Douglas, the incumbent, and Republican Abraham
Lincoln, the former congressman and challenger—stand in our
collective memory as the beau ideal beside which today's events
supposedly pale. In Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That
Defined America, historian Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg
College seeks to rescue these momentous clashes from their
gilded place in our lore. As an exemplar of the gauzy distortions
of hindsight, Guelzo cites late media scholar Neil Postman's
pronouncement that where Lincoln-Douglas embodied a literary
oratory and belonged to "the Age of Exposition," NixonKennedy and subsequent made-for-TV clashes were nothing but
creatures of "the Age of Show Business."
Please, Mr. Postman. Scholars should know better than to traffic
in such nostalgia; the Lincoln-Douglas contest, after all,
provided plenty of entertainment, too. Guelzo's feat is that he
does more than just resist the romanticized view of the event. He
takes on with equal relish the counterclaim, widely accepted by
academics, that the Lincoln-Douglas encounters were simply the
trashy "political theater" of a pre-wired era. While some
historians have argued that the turnout at debates like these
reflected simply the robust energies of the party machines,
58/104
which hustled out crowds and plied them with food and drink,
Guelzo gives the debates their popular due.
He does so by locating them within the context of the 1858
senatorial campaign, enfolding them in a seamless, if sometimes
heavy-going, narrative. He also grounds them in confident
analyses of the period's political culture: the state of the parties,
the prevalent style of campaigning and public speaking, and the
issues that voters worried about—above all, the debate over
slavery's expansion into the American West.
In 1858, America was approaching civil war. For more than a
generation, a series of compromises between North and South—
the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—had put off without resolving
the question of whether the nation could remain "half-slave and
half-free," as Lincoln put it in his "House Divided" speech while
accepting the Republican Party's senatorial nomination early that
summer. The core question was whether to permit slavery in
newly acquired Western lands. As early as 1854, Douglas had
championed the principle called "popular sovereignty," which let
settlers of these new territories decide for themselves whether to
legalize slavery. In response, Lincoln, who would soon leave the
Whig Party for the fledgling Republican Party (formed in
response to the Kansas controversy), emerged as one of Douglas'
most prominent critics, a "free soiler" devoted to keeping slavery
from the territories, going so far as to argue against his fellow
Illinoisan that slavery was ultimately incompatible with the
doctrine that all men are created equal.
For the Republicans to nominate such a fierce critic of slavery's
expansion in 1858 was risky. Some national party leaders, such
as newspaperman Horace Greeley of New York, threw their
support to Douglas. Others worried that Lincoln's stance too
closely resembled abolitionism—a dirty word in some parts—
which they feared would alienate the Whigs whose votes might
swing the election. Douglas, for his part, also had a fine line to
walk. Having fallen out with President James Buchanan, a
Democrat, for helping defeat Kansas' pro-slavery "Lecompton
Constitution," the veteran senator had to rally Democratic
loyalists without seeming to turn a blind eye to slavery's evils.
Although Douglas at first spurned the idea of debating, he soon
agreed to square off against his lesser-known rival. Such an
extensive joint "canvass" was unusual, especially since they
were campaigning, strictly speaking, not for their own election
but on behalf of their parties, seeking to elect state legislators
who would in turn choose the next U.S. senator. Each needed to
sweep into Springfield enough party-mates to guarantee victory
when the new legislature convened. Thus the high season of the
campaign, from August through the November election, became
in effect a single, rolling roadshow of a debate.
Guelzo carefully documents how each of the seven face-offs
assumed a slightly different character. At each stop, Lincoln and
Douglas replied to the other's charges from previous debates and
tailored their remarks to local audiences, whether Republican,
Democratic, or Whig. They also indulged in ad hominem
attacks, slung charges of dirty dealing, and distorted the other's
positions. The fierceness of these exchanges as Guelzo presents
them is bracing to behold—and, for what it's worth, lends
needed perspective to the dire claims we've been hearing lately
that this year's presidential campaign is uncommonly divisive.
The most jarring of these appeals are the frankly racist ones.
Douglas demonized Lincoln as a supporter of full equality for
blacks—not just "natural" rights such as freedom from slavery—
and brandished his own white supremacist bona fides. Between
debates, he played to the ugliest stereotypes, ranting, as one
paper noted, about "the unfortunate odor of the black man [and]
asked if his audience wished to eat with, ride with, go to church
with, travel with and in other ways bring Congo odor into their
nostrils." Lincoln, courting Whig voters, took pains to qualify
his support for racial equality. "I am not nor have ever been in
favor or making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor qualifying them
to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people," he said in
one debate, at the start of what Guelzo calls "a disgraceful
catalog of all the civil rights he, fully as much as Douglas,
believed blacks could be routinely deprived of." These moments
drive home just how remote from our own time the political
culture of the 1850s was. They destroy, too, the rosy picture of
the Lincoln-Douglas contests as an exercise in elevated rationalcritical discourse.
Yet neither the demagoguery nor the grandstanding nor the
cheap shots eclipsed the debates' substance. On the contrary,
Guelzo shows how the candidates worked over the whole
complex of slavery-related issues, in all their difficulty—not
with the language and rigor of philosophers but with
sophisticated reasoning nonetheless. Indeed, the main flaw of
Guelzo's book, its eye-rubbing density, results not from any
clotting in his prose, which is supple, but simply from the highly
intricate nature of the candidates' arguments. (Guelzo includes
scorecards to help his readers keep track.)
How audiences responded to these extended presentations,
Guelzo concedes, is hard to know. But he suggests that Douglas'
slender victory in November had a Pyrrhic quality. Lincoln, after
all, went on to earn a national reputation while Douglas muddied
his own defense of popular sovereignty enough to harm him in
the South two years later—when the Lincoln-Douglas rematch
(sans debates) put the free soiler in the White House.
Guelzo's conclusion, rooted in the ideas of Harvard political
theorist Michael Sandel, interprets the debates as a triumph of
Lincoln's moral vision over Douglas' arid proceduralism. It's
presented as something of an afterthought and doesn't adequately
close his stirring tale. He might have been better off drawing out
a claim that he leaves implicit, almost untapped: that down-and-
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dirty politics and serious argument about burning issues need not
exist in separate realms.
Indeed, it's worth considering whether fruitful clashes about
political ideas are most likely to occur not despite an
environment of raucous and sometimes ugly campaigning but
because of it. The constant canvassing of Lincoln and Douglas
around Illinois in the fall of 1858, their growing irritation with
each other and desire to demarcate their differences, produced
plenty of coarseness and heat. But the very intensity of their
engagement seems to have been necessary to generate a light
about slavery and its expansion that, among its other effects,
helped demonstrate the fitness of a newly prominent and battletested one-time congressman for the presidency two years later.
recycled
The Man Beneath the Hat
The truth about Lincoln's sexuality.
By David Greenberg
Feb. 12 is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. To
mark the occasion, Slate is recycling select articles about the
16th president of the United States from our archives. Reprinted
below is a 2005 "History Lesson" by David Greenberg on
Lincoln's sexuality.
The most surprising thing about The Intimate World of Abraham
Lincoln, the new book that claims the Great Emancipator was
bisexual, is how charitable the reviews have been. Even
skeptical reviewers have allowed that the author—the late
psychologist C.A. Tripp—may have a point and have retreated
to the safer position that Lincoln's sexual orientation doesn't
really matter anyway—that Tripp's project is a trivial one. The
conservative journalist Richard Brookhiser, for example, wrote
in the New York Times Book Review, "On the evidence before us,
Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back," but
then added emphatically that Lincoln the wartime leader "is the
Lincoln that matters. The rest is biography." Gore Vidal (whose
reputation as an essayist, it should be noted, far outstrips his
contributions as a historian) wrote in Vanity Fair online that
some of Tripp's "evidence," although admittedly
"circumstantial," is nonetheless "incontrovertible except perhaps
to the eye of faith, which, as we all know, is most selective and
ingenious when it comes to the ignoring of evidence."
Alas, both notions—that Lincoln's sexual orientation is
unimportant; and that Tripp's book raises powerful
circumstantial evidence to support his claims—are wrong. On
the one hand, if it could indeed be shown that Lincoln was
"predominantly homosexual," as Tripp puts it (after all, Lincoln
was married and had four children), this would be significant.
No, it wouldn't directly alter our understanding of his political
opinions or actions as president. But it would give us a fuller
sense of the private man and thus in indirect ways might revise
our understanding of his psychology. Tripp, however, doesn't
even begin to make a persuasive case in this tendentious, sloppy,
and wholly unpersuasive farrago. In more than 300 pages, he
gives us no convincing reason to believe his central claim.
Tripp's major pieces of "evidence" are familiar: that Lincoln
shared a bed for four years in his youth with his good friend
Joshua Speed, and occasionally in 1862 with David V.
Derickson, a member of his bodyguard detail. But as many
historians have noted, same-sex bed sharing was common at the
time and hardly proof of homosexual activities or feelings. As
the Princeton historian Christine Stansell notes in her excellent
review of The Intimate World, "Travelers piled in with each
other at inns; siblings routinely shared beds; women friends
often slept with each other as readily on an overnight visit as
they took their tea together in the kitchen—and sometimes
displaced husbands to do so. Civil War soldiers 'spooned' for
comfort and warmth." And in the cases of both Speed and
Derickson, there are more compelling reasons than
homosexuality to explain why Lincoln slept with them.
To bolster the case for his preferred interpretation, Tripp
willfully reads fact after fact to support his conclusions and to
ignore or explain away other possibilities. So, for instance, Tripp
insists that the anxiety that Lincoln and Speed expressed to each
other about their wedding nights proves they had a sexual
relationship, when such worries were hardly unusual in the days
before widespread premarital intercourse. Likewise, Tripp finds
what he calls a "smoking gun" in the way Lincoln signed one
letter to Speed: "Yours Forever." But in an honest afterword to
the book, historian Michael Burlingame reminds readers that
David Donald found cases of Lincoln using the same closing in
letters to at least a half-dozen other friends. One could go on.
Tripp produces not circumstantial evidence but facts that
resemble evidence only if one starts with a closed mind.
The Free Press and the book's editor, the highly regarded Bruce
Nichols, are to be commended for including Burlingame's essay,
which concludes: "Since it is virtually impossible to prove a
negative, Dr. Tripp's thesis cannot be rejected outright. But
given the paucity of hard evidence adduced by him, and given
the abundance of contrary evidence … a reasonable conclusion
… would be that it is possible but highly unlikely that Abraham
Lincoln was 'predominantly homosexual.' " I'd put it less
delicately: Lincoln may have been predominantly homosexual,
but there's no reason to believe so based on this book.
Why, then, have reviewers been so excessively charitable? It's
possible that they don't want to align themselves with a position
that could seem naive or, worse, anti-gay. Plenty of Lincoln
scholars have stuffily refused even to entertain the possibility of
60/104
Lincoln's bisexuality, either out of an ingrained homophobia or a
misguided reverence that borders on idolatry. Perhaps hoping to
silence critics, Tripp warns that, "Patriotic motives have proved
ever ready to obscure the raw parts [of Lincoln's personality], in
effect threatening to turn the real Lincoln into yet another
cardboard character."
It's also possible that people are hedging their bets because no
one wants to be proven wrong. Again, Tripp reminds his readers
that the possibility of Eleanor Roosevelt's bisexuality, which
now enjoys some credibility, was once written off by scholars.
Likewise, in a supportive afterword, historian Michael Chesson
notes a similar change in scholarly opinion about Thomas
Jefferson's affair with his slave Sally Hemings. In both cases,
experts who breezily dismissed allegations of what their
societies considered sexual deviance were shown to have been
blinkered by cultural prejudices.
In Eleanor Roosevelt's case, her lesbian leanings were long
denied. Then, several years ago, her letters to and from journalist
Lenora Hickok were released. Those notes were so passionate
and, at times, suggestive of physical intimacy that a sexual
relationship between the women, if it couldn't be proved, also
couldn't be ruled out. "I remember your eyes, with a kind of
teasing smile in them and that feeling of that soft spot just northeast of your mouth against my lips. I wonder what we'll do when
we meet—what we'll say," Hickok wrote to ER in 1933,
concluding the note, "Good night, dear one. I want to put my
arms around you and kiss you on the corner of your mouth. And
in a little more than a week now—I shall!" (For all his talk of
"smoking guns," Tripp produces nothing remotely like this
letter.) Not every Roosevelt scholar believes this relationship
was sexual, but many, including her most comprehensive
biographer, Blanche Wiesen Cook, consider it likely.
Even more embarrassing to some scholars was the emergence of
a consensus that Jefferson probably did father one or more
children with Hemings. This claim circulated way back in
Jefferson's day, and some of Hemings' descendants learned as a
matter of course that Jefferson was an ancestor. But Jefferson
scholarship for years was controlled largely by a Southern,
white, male aristocracy—led by such men as Dumas Malone and
Virginius Dabney—for whom the very thought of interracial sex
was anathema. These scholars dismissed the idea, sometimes
sneeringly, as slander. In 1974, however, Fawn Brodie's
psychohistory Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History revived
the argument, though it met with a chilly reception. Then, in
1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which demolished
the arguments of the Jefferson boosters and began to shift
scholarly opinion. The next year the journal Nature ran an article
by scientists who had conducted DNA tests that suggested
strongly that Jefferson was the father of Madison Hemings' male
offspring—leading important Jefferson authorities such as
Joseph Ellis to change their minds. Today, it's probably safe to
say, most informed historians believe that Jefferson did father
children with Hemings.
It would be a fallacy, however, to assume that Tripp has turned
in a paradigm-shifting work like Gordon-Reed's. The books
couldn't be more different. Gordon-Reed is careful in her
methods, rigorous in her logic, and tentative in her conclusions
(she never asserts that the Jefferson-Hemings affair definitely
happened, just that it shouldn't be reflexively discounted). Tripp
is random in his methods, sloppy in his logic, and overly certain
in his inferences. It's a shame: After all, most historians today
are liberal and tolerant enough to happily accept his claims of
Lincoln's bisexuality—if only someone were to offer some real
evidence to prove it.
recycled
Doggie Bag
Great scraps about the Westminster Dog Show from the Slate archives.
The 133rd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show continues today
at Madison Square Garden and tonight on the USA Network.
Even poodle fanciers and fans of Christopher Guest's
mockumentary Best in Show may feel bewildered by this quirky
sport, so over the years Slate has tried to shed some light on its
many idiosyncrasies.
In 2002, Alfred Gingold sent "Dispatches" from Madison Square
Garden and provided a little background on the event: "While
breeding dogs for specific (working) purposes is ancient, dog
shows are a relatively recent phenomenon. There were no
recorded breed standards, no clear sense of how a specific type
of dog should look, until the mid-19th century, when purebreds
became fashionable."
In 2003, Brendan I. Koerner explained why competing pups get
names like Ch. Set'R Ridge Wyndswept in Gold: "The names are
also often intensely personal, referring to a dog's hygienic habits,
a deceased loved one, or a favorite fictional character. … The
prefix 'Ch.' is an abbreviation for 'Champion.' "
In 2004, Jill Hunter Pellettieri revealed the surprisingly
pragmatic roots of poodles' high-maintenance coiffures. The
haircuts date to 16th-century Europe, when poodles were used as
water retrievers. "An unshorn poodle's thick coat could weigh it
down in the water," Pellettieri wrote. "With the bottom half of its
body shaved, the animal was more buoyant and could swim
more freely. The long mane and hair around the chest were left
intact to keep the poodle's vital organs warm in the cold water,
and owners also kept the hair around the joints to protect them
from cold and injury and to help prevent rheumatism."
61/104
Last year, Richard B. Woodward assessed the Plott hound, one
of four breeds making its debut. Plott hounds are "unlikely to
melt the hearts of television viewers," Woodward wrote, "but
those who can appreciate a more rural, less homogenized
America should be rooting for the Plotts whenever they step into
the ring." Also in 2008, Michelle Tsai asked what it takes for a
new breed to enter the competition. "[F]anciers must petition the
American Kennel Club, the organization in charge of the show."
Approval for a new breed can take "several years and depends
on the total number of dogs in a given breed and the
collaborative effort of its fanciers."
recycled
Did He Start the Fire?
How arson investigations into wildfires work.
By Daniel Engber
More than 170 people have been killed as of Monday in a major
fire spreading through southern Australia. The country currently
has some of the worst fire conditions possible, with temperatures
reaching 117 degrees and a severe drought. Investigators
believe the fires may have been deliberately set. In 2006, Daniel
Engber explained how investigators look for signs of arson in a
wildfire. The article is reprinted below.
evidence beneath. This evidence might include the "puddled"
burn patterns caused by an accelerant, or the remains of a
cigarette. Even a large fire could spare a butt or the bottom end
of a match, especially if a strong wind carried the fire away from
its source. Investigators also look for footprints or tire marks,
and they sometimes use magnets to find stray bits of metal that
might have been part of a time-delayed incendiary device. (Not
every incendiary device has metal parts—the simplest consist of
a lit cigarette bound together with a book of matches.)
Why do investigators suspect arson in the first place? In some
cases, they use negative evidence. They are likely to attribute a
blaze to foul play if they can't figure out any way in which it
could have started naturally. There's something fishy about a fire
that starts out in the open without any record of lightning in the
area. That's one reason police suspected arson as the cause of the
Esperanza fire. An eyewitness also said he saw a couple of men
leaving the scene around the time the fire started.
Investigators in California can consult a registry of convicted
arsonists to see if any easy suspects happen to be living nearby.
Unlike the registry of sex offenders (which is run by the same
program), the arson registry is accessible only to members of
law enforcement. California also maintains a database of arson
cases that includes a list of suspects and a modus operandi for
each fire. The five choices for M.O. are liquid accelerant,
nonliquid accelerant, heat source, trailer, and incendiary device.
Prosecutors filed charges on Thursday against Raymond Lee
Oyler, the man suspected of setting last week's deadly Esperanza
fire in Southern California. Oyler faces multiple counts of
murder, arson, and use of an incendiary device. How do you
investigate a wildfire for signs of arson?
First, figure out where it got started. The place where firefighters
first engaged with the blaze is a good place to begin, as are spots
where eyewitnesses say they first saw flames or charred ground.
Once they're in the ballpark, a careful study of burn patterns can
guide investigators to the fire's point of origin.
The patterns are helpful because a fire usually burns up and
away from its origin. Nearby grass will be singed in that
direction, with burns that taper away from the source of the
flames. Trees are more likely to be charred black on the side
from which the fire advanced, with less damage on the opposite
face. Noncombustible items—like rocks, soil, beer cans, or
rabbit pellets—may show patterns of discoloration that suggest a
fire moving in a particular direction.
Once the investigators have narrowed the origin of the fire to a
small enough area, they can lay down something like an
archaeological grid and start sifting through the debris. The top
level of fire debris may need to be blown off to find the physical
Explainer thanks Dick Ford of the International Association of
Arson Investigators and Brad Hamil of Hamil Investigations.
recycled
The Baseball Player as Android
How Alex Rodriguez inched toward humanity.
By Bryan Curtis
Saturday, February 7, 2009, at 3:34 PM ET
On Saturday, Sports Illustrated reported that Alex Rodriguez
tested positive for steroids in 2003, in his last year with the
Texas Rangers. According to SI, Rodriguez—who has long
denied taking performance-enhancing drugs—was also tipped
off about an upcoming drug test in 2004 by Gene Orza, the chief
operating officer of the Major League Baseball Players
Association. In 2007, on the occasion of Rodriguez's new megacontract with the Yankees, Bryan Curtis argued that "baseball's
most robotic superstar [had] finally gained self-awareness." The
article is reprinted below.
62/104
What to make of the news that Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees
have agreed to the outlines of a new 10-year, $275 million
contract? Some have called it a triumph for Hank and Hal
Steinbrenner, the once-hapless sons who have been tapped by
their dad to run the club. Others have focused on the rare and
humiliating defeat for "super agent" Scott Boras, the man who
convinced Rodriguez not only to opt out of his previous Yankees
deal—which still had $81 million left—but to announce this
decision during the deciding game of the World Series, and thus
incur the wrath of baseball. Both these things are true, but I
prefer to read it another way: Last week was the moment that
Rodriguez, baseball's most robotic superstar, finally gained selfawareness.
To this point, Rodriguez's eerie precision with the bat has been
exceeded only by his ability, in nearly every setting, to project
the personality of an android. His quotes to the media are
masterworks of banality: "I'm just going to do my job and go out
and play." This drabness has become more pronounced since
Rodriguez joined the Yankees in 2004. For one thing, he was
forced to move gingerly on a team with an established hierarchy;
according to Sports Illustrated, his friendships with stars like
Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada had to be brokered by Tino
Martinez, who was friends with both camps. Moreover,
Rodriguez has been assailed by the newspapers for his poor
postseason performance, which only pushed him further into his
shell. The only truly revelatory moment of Rodriguez's career in
New York was his admission, in 2005, that he sees a therapist—
quite a bit of candor for a baseball player. Even that was
undermined when Rodriguez later said, "I didn't do it for me. I
did it for the children."
The gaps in Rodriguez's public persona have been filled in by
Boras, who has been his agent since 1993, the year he was
drafted first overall by the Seattle Mariners. As Ben McGrath
pointed out in his recent New Yorker profile, Boras seems to
mesh best with "less self-assured stars." Rodriguez and Boras
had a symbiotic relationship that went beyond the usual playeragent connection. Boras not only negotiated A-Rod's contracts
but, in the face of the latter's reluctance to say anything of
interest, indirectly provided him with a kind of personality. It
took Rodriguez many years to recognize that it was not a likable
one.
When Boras orchestrated A-Rod's first mega-contract in 2000,
he distributed a 70-page booklet to interested teams that put
Rodriguez's statistics alongside quotes from Leonardo da Vinci
and Michelangelo. During the negotiations, Mets general
manager Steve Phillips said that, in addition to an exorbitant
contract, Boras had demanded Rodriguez receive a private office
at Shea Stadium, a merchandise tent, and a large "billboard
presence" in Manhattan. (Both Boras and Rodriguez denied
making these demands.) Rodriguez said he would just as soon
re-sign with his current team, Seattle, but Boras brushed off the
Mariners when their offer came up short. The Texas Rangers
eventually signed Rodriguez to a 10-year, $252 million contract,
double the amount of what was then the richest guaranteed
contract in sports.
A-Rod was a perfect lab rat for Boras' rapacious capitalism.
Rodriguez's statistics were unrivaled in baseball history.
Moreover, his sphinxlike demeanor played to Boras' strength:
the creation of an environment in which team owners have as
little information as possible and thus are likely to submit
enormous bids. When the Rangers began exploring trade
possibilities for Rodriguez in 2004, the superstar maintained his
circumspect style. Courtesy of Jamey Newberg's Newberg
Report, an exquisite annual devoted to the Rangers, here's a list
of A-Rod quotes as the player prepared to leave Arlington. A
few weeks before he left the team: "I definitely think I'm going
to be here for a long time. I'm probably pretty sure it will work
out for the best." On what he wanted: "There is a difference
between image and reputation. Image is nice; reputation is
developed over an entire career. Reputation is what I'm
searching for." Got that?
In New York, Rodriguez will forever suffer in comparison to
Jeter, the Yankees' captain and probably the team's most popular
player. Jeter is a Yankees lifer with four championships, but he's
also an aggressive media schmoozer and clubhouse politician.
Though he's also well-paid ($19 million per season) and hardly
more profound than Rodriguez, he has a better sense of how
much he can get away with. According to Rodriguez, he and
Jeter used to be "blood brothers," but their relationship began a
steady downward trajectory after Rodriguez told Esquire that
Jeter was a complementary player: "You never say, 'Don't let
Derek beat you.' He's never your concern." Jeter never would
have been so tone-deaf.
Boras' ventriloquism reached its reductio ad absurdum this
November. It made sense that the agent would advise Rodriguez
to opt out of the remaining years of his Yankees contract so that
he could negotiate a longer deal for more money. But when the
Steinbrenners requested a face-to-face meeting, Boras told them
he wouldn't allow it unless they offered $350 million—a
ludicrous amount even for the free-spending Yankees. Though
Boras had a 10-day window in which to opt out, he chose to do
so during the World Series. This captured not only the attention
of the Fox announcers but Red Sox fans sitting near one of the
dugouts, who begun chanting, "Don't sign A-Rod!"
One should not begrudge a player or agent for getting all that the
market will bear. But the Game 4 fiasco seemed to be a tipping
point. By outsourcing so much of his personality to Boras,
Rodriguez seemed to realize he had sacrificed a huge amount of
nonmonetary capital. A-Rod might be Michelangelo in the body
of Hank Aaron, but fans loathed him because they knew him as
nothing more than a self-interested punk—as Sports Illustrated
63/104
put it, "a Narcissus who found pride and comfort gazing upon
the reflection of his own beautiful statistics."
(Judd Apatow, why won't you return my calls?) I set out to find
the best heater on the market for less than $200.
Last week, the robot seemed to awaken. After a consultation
with billionaire Warren Buffett (!), Rodriguez met with the
Yankees without Boras on Nov. 14. He hammered out the
parameters of a new contract that, in humbling fashion, was
worth less in guaranteed money than the Yankees had offered
initially. It was perhaps less money, too, than Rodriguez would
have gotten in a Boras-led auction between teams like the
Dodgers and Angels. But in meeting with the Steinbrenners on
his own, Rodriguez became, finally, a man who could
communicate his own desires. "I think it's the best way you can
do things," he later told MLB.com. "I felt sometimes the
messages can be mixed up, and you may be getting some
information that is not 100 percent accurate. I just took it upon
myself to call Hank and talk to him one on one."
Methodology
As luck would have it, Los Angeles was experiencing an
unseasonable heat wave when I began my testing. On a balmy
88-degree afternoon, I tried to cool down my friends' bedroom to
60 degrees using their air conditioner (I don't have one of those,
either) and then see how long it took to raise the temperature
with one of the heaters. It was a bit like that old Steven Wright
joke about putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same
room and watching them fight it out. Unfortunately, the
thermometer I purchased from Radio Shack was designed to
read the temperature of an object, not the ambient temperature of
a room. Oops.
Boras was marginalized but not altogether absent. As of this
writing, he is said to be finalizing parts of the contract. But it
was clear, to borrow a term from the former co-owner of the
Texas Rangers, who the "decider" was in this negotiation. And
even if Rodriguez had merely dumped Boras to genuflect before
Warren Buffet, an even more rapacious capitalist, he at least
showed some temerity in making that decision. By speaking out,
A-Rod showed that beneath his robotic exterior lurks a real
player and a real human, one who values "comfort, stability, and
happiness," as he put it in a message on his Web site. For once,
Scott Boras had no immediate response.
shopping
Heated Debate
Which space heater is best?
By Dan Crane
Just over a year ago, I escaped from New York City and
migrated to Los Angeles seeking sunshine and cheap rent.
Happily, I found both. I was dismayed to learn, however, that
even in the land of perpetual sunglasses, winter nights get quite
chilly, with lows in the mid-40s. Don't get me wrong—I know
Los Angeles isn't Michigan, and I'm certainly not asking for pity.
Still, many older California homes lack heating, not to mention
insulation, and unfortunately our collective narcissism fails to
keep us warm.
Shivering on my couch one evening, I began to wonder whether
space heaters, which have always struck me as rather dinky,
could raise the temperature in my house above sweater-required
range. As I've yet to make it big as a Hollywood screenwriter
Eventually the city cooled down, and I decided just to get
subjective with my testing: I bought a bunch of heaters, turned
them on at night when it got chilly, and graded them. Each
heater could score a possible 31 points, with 5, 6, or 10 points
assigned for the following categories:
Warm Up (10 possible points): How long did it take for my
room to go from cold to cozy? The quicker the temperature
change, the higher the score.
Noise (5 possible points): Is the heater louder than a snoring
sleeping companion? Is it likely to keep you up at night? Does it
buzz, whirr loudly, or make that awful clanking sound like the
radiator pipes in an old apartment building? A perfect 5, in this
case, means perfectly silent.
Safety (6 possible points): "More than 25,000 residential fires
every year are associated with the use of space heaters, causing
more than 300 deaths," according to the U.S. Consumer Product
Safety Commission, and "an estimated 6,000 persons receive
hospital emergency room care for burn injuries associated with
contacting hot surfaces of room heaters, mostly in non-fire
situations." Yikes. Some units include no safety features, and
others have two or three. I awarded 2 points for each one.
Bells and Whistles (10 possible points): Does the unit have a
thermostat? Is it digitally controlled? Does the heater have a
programmable timer? How about a frost feature (which turns the
heater on at about 41 degrees Fahrenheit) to prevent a room from
freezing?
Here are the results from cold as ice to hot-blooded:
Lasko Model 5429 Oscillating Ceramic Heater With
Adjustable Thermostat, $36.94
This heater is compact and vaguely resembles the head of a
small robot or a boom box with only one speaker. Like all
64/104
ceramic heaters, it works by using electricity to heat a ceramic
plate surrounded by aluminum baffles. The aluminum absorbs
the heat and then a fan blows warm air out into your room.
Although this unit doesn't score well in the bells and whistles
category—two speeds, a low/high heat dial, an oscillation on or
off button, and no safety features—this unit could work well
under one's desk to warm the toes. For the price, it's a perfectly
adequate little machine.
Warm Up: 5
Noise: 2
Safety: 0
Bells and Whistles: 3
Total: 10
Delonghi Oil Filled EW7707CM, $54.42
In my test runs, this Delonghi, shaped like a classic radiator
heater, put out a nice, soothing heat and was noise-free save for
the rare and unobtrusive click of the metal when it turned on.
But it took a while—roughly 20 minutes—to get cooking and,
unfortunately, the design wasn't the only retro aspect of this
machine. Instead of a digital readout showing your optimal
temperature, there's just a knob; and the only safety feature on
this rather heavy heater (which weighs in at just over 25 pounds)
is the automatic overheating shut-off.
Warm Up: 1
Noise: 5
Safety: 2
Total: 11
Vornado Digital Vortex DVTH, $159
When I think "digital vortex," I think Facebook; but I suppose
this electric heater deserves the title, too: It blasts warm air
through a fan and has a digital panel displaying both the current
and desired temperatures. A compact unit, the Vornado comes
with a remote control and has a sleek appearance. It also turns
off immediately if tipped over, and the exterior stays cool to the
touch. But this heater was too loud for a light sleeper like me,
who needs regular doses of Ambien. When the heating
element—which resembles the metal coil on the inside of a hair
dryer—turned on or off there was a strange buzzing sound, and
after it reached my desired room temperature, the fan stayed on,
blowing cool air at my head. It's also rather pricey.
Warm Up: 7
Noise: 1
Safety: 2
Total: 16
Honeywell HZ-7200 Cool Touch Oscillating Heater With
Smart Energy Digital Control Plus, $58.63
For the money, this thing cooks. It's the only one of the smaller
convection heaters I tested with a frost-watch setting that will
kick the heater on if the room temperature reaches close to
freezing. The major drawback of this black, oval-shaped
model—which looks like a squished, miniature Death Star—is
its short, 22-inch power cord. If you don't have a lot of outlets in
your house or they are not conveniently located, this could
present a problem. (Also note that only heavy-duty extension
cords should be used with space heaters.) Safety features include
tip-over shut-off and overheating protection.
Warm Up: 6
Noise: 2
Safety: 2 (reduced due to short power cord)
Total: 16
DeLonghi HHP1500 Mica Panel Radiator, $89.99
This was the best heater for instant, silent, blazing toastiness.
While the large panel—which looks somewhat like a flat-screen
television on wheels—fires up quickly and emits a strong radiant
heat, there's no fan to circulate the air, so it's a bit slow on room
warm-up time. A ceiling fan or a small stand-up fan would work
well in tandem with this unit.
What prevents this perfectly good heater from being a really
great one is that it's a little skimpy when it comes to features—
no timer, no thermostat readout. It also seems odd and somewhat
frightening that it doesn't have a tip-over safety shut-off, as its
height and slender shape makes it really easy to topple.
Warm Up: 5
Noise: 5
Safety: 2
Total: 18
Delonghi Safe Heat Ceramic Tower, $90.20
At the highest setting, the Delonghi Tower seemed to crank out a
bit more powerfully than other ceramic heaters. It's also nicely
tricked out, with a remote control, 24-hour timer, automatic
overheat protection, and a tip-over safety mechanism—which,
considering its height (28 inches from the base), is definitely a
wise addition. But the interface was the least user-friendly of the
bunch. (If your father regularly asks you how to turn on a
computer, don't buy him this heater.) And like the Vornado fan,
this heater makes an annoying beeping sound when you change
the temperature.
65/104
Warm Up: 9
Noise: 2
Safety: 4
Total: 23
Honeywell HZ-385BP Safety Sentinel Electronic Ceramic
Tower Heater, $78.99
This model has the most safety features of the bunch: automatic
tip-over shut-off, overheating shut-off, and a power cutoff if
something—child, pet, strewn clothing—gets too close to the
infrared sensor mounted on the bottom front of the unit. It's also
the only model I tested that has the option of displaying
temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius. (My Scottish girlfriend
speaks only Celsius, so I found this particularly useful.) Some
Amazon users complained of a beeping noise when changing the
temperature settings, but Honeywell must have heard their
cries—this model worked without beeps.
Warm Up: 9
Noise: 2
Safety: 6
Total: 25
Conclusion
Finding the best heater depends on what you're using it for—
how big is the room you are heating? How cold is it? In general,
electric convection (oil-filled heaters or heat panels) seemed best
for heating a room slowly but surely while fan-forced convection
heaters are best for quickly raising the temperature.
Jellyfish!
A daily video from Slate V.
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sports nut
Alex Rodriguez, Fallen Hero?
As for me, I'm not sure I found the best heater. My ideal
machine would've been some Frankenstein version of the
Delonghi Mica Panel with an internal fan like the Vornado's, a
simple digital readout, a multi-hour programmable timer (so I
could set it to turn on early in the morning and before bedtime),
and all the safety features.
It's 2009—how hard can this be?
slate v
What Was I Thinking? Porn-Star Boyfriend
slate v
Science News: Beware Everlasting
Nobody liked him before the steroids, nobody likes him now.
By Tim Marchman
Sunday, February 8, 2009, at 5:01 PM ET
Before Saturday afternoon, Alex Rodriguez was the most hated
figure in baseball, a man perhaps best known for scurrying away
from the birth of his own child to practice kabbalah with
Madonna. Sports Illustrated's report that Rodriguez failed a
steroid test in 2003, you might think, would strengthen that wellearned hatred, causing fans and columnists to lash out at the
hypocrisy of a guy who denied on prime-time TV that he'd ever
taken steroids. Instead, our finest sports pundits have presented
an implausible emotion: sadness. The player whose own
teammates called him A-Fraud was, we're now told, baseball's
"savior on a white steed," and "the guy who would show that
clean players could be just as prolific as the cheaters." From the
great Jay Mariotti, we even learned that "[i]f baseball ever was
to move forward, past the integrity-scarring scandals that
exposed a sport as dirty and the commissioner and owners as
conspirators, Alex Rodriguez had to be juice-free."
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Of course, the only thing less surprising at this point than a
baseball player being on steroids is a columnist clutching his
pearls about the sanctity of the game. Anyone who was paying
the least attention would recognize that a player as reviled (and
as suspiciously muscular) as Rodriguez had as much chance of
redeeming baseball as Barry Bonds. There was always
something inherently implausible about the idea of a 225-pound
shortstop playing Gold Glove defense while popping 50 home
runs a year. Perhaps more to the point, Jose Canseco, the selfproclaimed Johnny Appleseed of steroids, wrote in his second
book, Vindicated, that Rodriguez had asked him, "point blank,
where one would go to get steroids if one wanted them." At that
point, Canseco wrote, he hooked him up with a dealer named
Max.
An accusation in a book isn't proof of anything, but this is the
kind of claim that's usually met with a lawsuit if it isn't true.
Rodriguez filed no such suit. That anyone could have connected
those dots and yet maintained a belief in Rodriguez's purity tells
you everything you need to know about how much baseball's
drug scandals have taught the press and the public. Twenty-one
years after Canseco freaked out the world by hitting 42 home
runs and stealing 40 bases while carrying enough muscle to play
linebacker, 11 years after the dubious exploits of Mark McGwire
and Sammy Sosa, eight years after Barry Bonds dropped 73
bombs, and four years after a 42-year-old Roger Clemens ran up
a 1.87 ERA, smart people who pay close attention to the sport
still haven't caught on to the recurring pattern by which
suspiciously superhuman achievement is invariably revealed, in
the fullness of time, to have been chemically aided.
If the real lesson of the Rodriguez revelation is that anyone you
ever thought might be on steroids likely was on steroids, it
doesn't necessarily follow that there's anything wrong with that.
In fact, the SI report may offer baseball its last, best chance to
come clean and admit the truth: There isn't much anyone can do
to stop determined ballplayers from doing drugs, and there may
not be much reason for anyone to want to stop them.
Start with the most glaring commonality among the sport's
various drug scandals, which is that there is nearly always a
lengthy lag between a player committing some allegedly drugfueled feat and the public learning of it. While neither Major
League Baseball nor the press have distinguished themselves in
their handling of drug issues, the basic problem is that science
is—and likely always will be—ahead of enforcement, whether it
comes in the form of drug testing or press scrutiny. When
baseball had no serious testing policy, athletes were able to all
but openly take whatever they liked without anyone doing
anything about it. We're only learning now about the results of
the first serious tests, which were administered six years ago.
(Why we're learning about them at all, given that these tests
were supposed to be anonymous, is probably the biggest issue
here, but leave that aside for the moment.) No one with any
knowledge of the subject doubts that even now players are
figuring out ways to beat the system, and it follows that five or
10 years from now we'll learn from some tell-all book or epic
work of investigative reporting that various players now
generally taken to be clean are, in fact, juiced. That's the reality
to which we have to adjust.
Why is this so? Because just like lawyers, doctors, and students
taking pills to help them work through brutal hours, many
ballplayers think that taking drugs will make them better at their
jobs. This may or may not be so—no one has ever presented
credible evidence proving that performance-enhancing drugs
make athletes better at playing baseball—but so long as at least
some players think that drugs will help them, players will take
them. Cases like those of Bonds, Clemens, and Rodriguez will
always be more complex than that of the average player looking
to make a few dollars he might otherwise not make, bringing to
bear as they do the various psychological problems that both
drive an athlete to excel and convince him that to meet his own
standards he needs to be better than he can possibly be. But these
scandals boil down to players wanting to be good at what they
do, something no amount of bad press and no drug-testing
program can eliminate.
In the end, no matter how much the shrieking moralists might
like to pretend otherwise, drug use hasn't done much harm to
baseball at all. In their day, genuinely likable players like
McGwire and Sosa were held up as real paragons of virtue and
saviors of a benighted sport; the destruction of their reputations
and the actual admissions made by equally likable players such
as Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte haven't damaged baseball a
bit. You can prove that more or less every great ballplayer is an
outright fraud, but you can't make anyone like baseball a jot less
for it. It's still an open question whether this fact will ever settle
in: People don't care much more about whether their favorite
ballplayers take drugs than they care about whether Michael
Phelps likes to get high. In the meantime, expect Alex Rodriguez
to hit a lot of home runs and to be hated by everyone who
watches baseball—exactly what would have happened had SI
never run its report at all.
technology
Satellite Diss
Sirius XM bet on a losing technology. Here's how the company can save itself.
By Farhad Manjoo
Satellite radio is falling out of orbit. Sirius XM, the product of a
merger between America's founding satellite radio companies, is
reportedly unable to meet a $175 million debt payment due at
the end of the month. It has hired bankruptcy advisers and has
been talking to satellite TV companies about a possible takeover.
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None of this is surprising. Though many of Sirius XM's
problems have been exacerbated by the economy—the company
loaded up more than $3 billion in debt with the expectation that
cheap credit would remain plentiful—satellite radio has always
been an idea out of step with the times. Like print newspapers,
travel agencies, and record shops, Sirius XM offers what seems
like a pretty great service—the world's best radio programming
for just a small monthly fee—that has, in practice, been eclipsed
by something far cheaper and more convenient: the Internet.
Go online and you can find just about any music or talk show
that you want. It's pretty much all free, and it's computationally
personalized to suit your tastes. You can get these services on
the go, too. Apple's iPhone, Google's Android platform, and
other smartphones can stream a huge lineup of radio content
through cellular networks. There are still many hiccups—3G
wireless networks don't yet blanket the nation nearly as well as
Sirius XM's seven geosynchronous satellites—but Internet
radio's reach is sure to expand. Indeed, it's already mesmerizing:
Load up a program like Pandora or the Public Radio Tuner on
your iPhone, plug it into your car's audio-in jack, and you've got
access to a wider stream of music than you'll ever get through
satellite.
It's hard to blame entrenched industries for failing to see how
new technologies might upend their operations. But unlike other
business models that were killed off by the digital transition,
satellite radio isn't ancient. The dream began in the late 1980s,
when Martin Rothblatt, a lawyer, entrepreneur, and satellite
enthusiast, began to lobby the Federal Communications
Commission to devote a part of the spectrum to radio beamed
from the sky. (Rothblatt, who later underwent a sex-change
operation and became Martine, now runs the Terasem
Movement, an organization that aims to educate the public on
"creating consciousness in self-replicating machines.") In 1992,
two companies—Rothblatt's, which later became Sirius, and
XM—bought licenses to the spectrum, and over the next decade
they set about starting extra-planetary radio stations. They
launched satellites, developed portable receivers, and built up
huge programming facilities. By the time they began
operations—XM in 2001, and Sirius in 2002—they were already
outdated.
Remember, this was after the advent of Napster—people were
already used to getting every song on demand. Sirius and XM
found that the only way to convince customers to pay $10 or
more a month for radio was to offer exclusive acts. This proved
expensive. In 2004, Sirius signed Howard Stern to a $500
million, 5-year contract; in a bombastic press release, Stern
called Sirius "the future of radio," and the company declared the
move "the most important deal in radio history." Soon after,
Oprah signed with XM. Martha Stewart went to Sirius. Besides
talent, the companies also spent a bundle on subsidies to
automakers to get satellite receivers pre-installed in cars. And, of
course, they had to keep running those satellites.
Altogether, the economics of satellite radio are ugly: Sirius
XM—after a long regulatory review, the companies merged last
summer—now pays about $100 million a year to maintain its
satellites; about $1 billion on programming and royalties; and
about $600 million on various "customer acquisition costs,"
including discounts and subsidies. For a while, these huge
outlays worked—the company has about 19 million
subscribers—but dampening car sales have cut its growth rate.
Sirius and XM never made a profit, and last fall, the merged
company predicted that it wouldn't see its first positive cash
flows until 2012.
In retrospect, the most important announcement in the recent
history of radio had nothing to do with Howard Stern. Instead, it
was Apple's unveiling of the iPod in the fall of 2001. The device
didn't look like a radio killer—after all, it couldn't receive any
signals. But the iPod could connect to your computer, and your
computer was connected to the Internet—so, really, the iPod
could get everything. In addition to carrying all the music you
could get through your favorite file-sharing app, digital music
players spawned podcasts—essentially time-shifted radio—
which attracted both talented amateurs and established stars.
Then, with the introduction of the iPhone, the iPod went live.
How could satellite possibly compete? Music is the nichiest of
all popular arts; the more people a radio station reaches, the
more people it's got to satisfy, and the more likely you are to
hear stuff you hate. Even with its plethora of channels, satellite
is still a one-way, mass-media technology, while the portable
Internet allows endless interactivity. Don't like a song? Skip to
the next one. Like something? Press thumbs up. That's how
Pandora works—over time, the station learns about your tastes,
and eventually begins to serve up old songs and new stuff that
you can't resist. The Internet allows all kinds of other neat tricks:
FlyCast, a radio app for the iPhone that features tens of
thousands of both terrestrial and Internet stations, lets you skip
back to the start of a talk show if you joined late. You can't do
that on satellite.
Despite all of this gloom and doom, the Internet doesn't have to
be the death of Sirius XM. If the company can get its debt in
order, it might find that the network can be its savior. My
advice: Forget the satellites, the special radios, and the huge
customer acquisition costs. Instead, focus on your content—and
figure out a way to get it to the largest possible audience at very
low prices. Sirius XM should make sure that Howard Stern and
Oprah and Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour and the NFL
and Major League Baseball are available on every Internetconnected device on the market.
At the moment, the company charges $13 per month for Web
access to non-satellite-radio subscribers. (Satellite customers
used to get online access for free, but Sirius XM recently started
charging $3 a month.) If Sirius XM slashed that price
dramatically—which it could afford if it stopped paying off
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automakers—it would see a huge rise in online subscribers.
These people would pay to get Sirius not only on the Web but on
their phones. There have long been rumors that Sirius is building
an iPhone app; the company ought to make those rumors a
reality, plus get its service on Android and the BlackBerry. And
be sure to make it the cellular radio app, packed with features
that allow for personalization—great enough that people will
pay $5 a month for it. Also, start doing podcasts! The Stern
show is one of the most pilfered programs online. I'm sure that
lots of people trade MP3s of his program because they just don't
want to pay for it. But I'm guessing that lots of people would pay
$1 for an ad-free version of yesterday's show that they could
listen to on the train or at the gym. And I'm sure Sirius XM can
come up with a bunch more ideas—once you realize that your
potential audience is everyone with a Web connection, the
possibilities abound.
technology
Tech for America
Should Obama really use stimulus money to invest in broadband and online
medical records?
By Farhad Manjoo
About 10 percent of Americans today don't have access to highspeed Internet service. The rest of us are pretty much stuck in the
granny lane—on average, we get broadband speeds of less than
5 megabits per second, 10 to 20 times slower than what people
in many other countries enjoy. Derek Turner, research director
for the public policy group Free Press, dreams about America
becoming a "broadband utopia." In Turner's paradise, you'd be
able to order up a fast connection no matter where you lived.
And not just that—several broadband providers would compete
with one another to bring super-fast service to your door, a
dynamic that would keep prices low and speeds very high (100
MBps downloads and uploads, a file-trading gamer's promised
land).
In a policy paper that Free Press put out in December, Turner
and his colleagues called on the Obama administration to spend
$44 billion to realize this dream. The broadband advocates argue
that the money would boost short-term economic activity—we'd
need tens of thousands of people to produce and maintain fiberoptic cables, routers, and other equipment; to dig trenches and
climb poles to install the new broadband lines; to staff customer
service and billing centers; and to train everyone to use the new
stuff. The long-run effects of a national broadband plan are even
rosier. More than any other investment, Free Press argues,
Internet lines would stimulate activity broadly across the
American economy, fostering innovation and new jobs in
education, health care, retail, and high-tech businesses.
That sounds great—sign me up! But wait a second … here's Don
Detmer, president of the American Medical Informatics
Association. In an open letter to Obama shortly before the
inauguration, Detmer called on the new administration to spend
$10 billion a year for five years to create electronic medical
records, a huge project that would require the training and hiring
of tens of thousands of new health care and technology workers.
Not only would the plan create new jobs, Detmer says, it would
also reduce costs by making medicine more efficient. Plus, the
investment would improve our health—electronic records would
allow for more advanced medical research and significantly
reduce errors. (Doctors' sloppy handwriting supposedly kills
more than 7,000 patients a year.)
OK, now I'm confused. Should we spend stimulus money on
building a broadband utopia or on transforming health care? Or
both? Or maybe, as Thomas Friedman has argued, we ought to
build advanced batteries, hybrid drivetrains, and other
environmentally friendly technologies. That sounds great, too,
right? But what about a completely redesigned "smart"
electricity grid that would be able to handle a new generation of
plug-in cars, fuel cells, and other as-yet-unimagined powergeneration technologies—what some people have called the next
Internet. Let's hear it, American taxpayers: Which of these
things, if any, do we want to fund?
The two stimulus plans working through Congress outline far
fewer funds for high-tech projects than their advocates would
like. The House and the Senate are calling for around $6 billion
or $7 billion to fund broadband infrastructure, with much of that
money going to rural areas—a far cry from the $44 billion Free
Press asked for. Congress seems to be settling on about $20
billion to $25 billion to improve health care technology—about
half or a third of what estimates say a transition to e-health
records would cost.
The problem with calling for any government funding of
technology is that the future always sounds terrific. Who doesn't
want cheap Internet everywhere, an end to medical errors, and an
electric system that could change the way we drive? Sketched
out like this—a series of plans that promises radical
advancements after a relatively small investment of resources—
it seems crazy not to sign up for every one of these ideas. After
all, the U.S. government has played a huge role in the inception
of nearly every modern innovation we enjoy today. Government
research grants were present at the creation of microprocessors,
databases, the graphical user interface, video games, the Internet,
and the World Wide Web, among many other great things. (See
this research report.)
But spending on tech can be very tricky. Advocates for a hightech stimulus aren't calling for much research money. Instead
they're arguing for spending at a more advanced stage of
development—they envision the government sponsoring the
creation and deployment of ready-to-use technology. And we're
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all familiar with spectacular government-funded tech failures at
that stage—think missile defense, the terminally broken
computer systems built for the IRS and the FBI, and the Census
Bureau's stalled effort to automate its data collection. The
government is not alone in tech incompetence; high-tech
companies themselves are regularly blindsided by the future.
Look at Sony: Why did the company that brought us the
Walkman fail to anticipate the iPod? Why did the company that
brought us the PlayStation and the PS2 fail with the PS3? Apple
built the first mainstream operating system with a graphical user
interface—and then lost that business to Microsoft, which saw
that the big money was in the OS, not computer hardware. These
failures illustrate the profound difficulty of constructing any
kind of tech stimulus package—the past seems to offer little
guidance on what people will want tomorrow. But they also
suggest a way for President Obama to avoid such pitfalls: He
should use the stimulus money to set up something like a
government-sponsored venture capital fund. The administration
could give out a little bit of money to give a boost to a lot of
great ideas, then continue to fund only those ideas that succeed.
After all, the risks in these plans are clear. Over the last few
years, a handful of American cities have built systems to provide
low-cost wireless Internet service to their citizens. Most haven't
taken off. Would an effort to bring broadband infrastructure to
rural areas suffer the same fate—what if we built it and no one
signed up? The push for electronic health records could also be a
boondoggle: What if patients, wary of the privacy safeguards,
balk at having their medical histories computerized? What if
hospital workers were slow to learn how to use the new systems?
What if the software at different hospitals or different parts of
the country were incompatible? (See the computer systems at the
various intelligence agencies.)
One way to avoid such problems would be for government to
stay out of tech innovation entirely. Last week I had a long talk
with Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the
Cato Institute, the libertarian group that opposes any stimulus
plan whatsoever. In general, Harper favors tax breaks and
decreased regulation to spur private-sector innovation in
broadband, health care, and other parts of the economy. When I
asked about electronic health records, Harper pointed to the
success of OpenTable.com, the site that's brought Web-based
restaurant reservations to many cities across the world.
OpenTable gives diners a convenient way to make reservations;
restaurants looking to attract these customers pay a monthly fee
to participate in the service. Harper argues that if we reduce
regulation in health care, we'd see an electronic records solution
emerge from the private sector, just like we saw a reservation
system emerge in the restaurant industry. A health-record startup
could enlist a forward-thinking set of hospitals and insurance
companies and then give patients some inducement—discounted
insurance or drug prices—to computerize their records. If
patients show an interest in that plan, it would spread across the
country; if not, it would die.
But Harper's ideas sound just as dreamy as those coming from
the other side. Detmer points out that half of all money now
spent on health care in America is spent by the government—so
unless you expect the government to get out of health care
entirely (unlikely, and, to many people, unwise), you can't
improve medical technology without having the government
take part. A similar problem dogs innovation in broadband: A
long history of poor telecom policies has left us with just two
entities providing fast service—the big phone companies and the
big cable companies. Verizon is the only company in America
that has large-scale plans to deploy fiber-optic lines to homes—
and only 6 million of them. That's why, as Free Press argues, the
government is the only entity that can bring truly high-speed
broadband to the masses.
As it's constructed now, the stimulus bill would give the
administration carte blanche to choose between technological
investments. The Senate version of the stimulus bill, for
instance, allows the administration to give grants to any number
of projects that promise to bring broadband to underserved areas.
In order to keep waste to a minimum, President Obama ought to
allocate the funds in a way that has proved successful in Silicon
Valley: He should act as an angel investor, giving lots of little
grants to sponsor different technological approaches to the same
problem. For instance, the administration could invest in a dozen
or more health-record systems, then see which ones prove most
attractive to patients and doctors. In the case of broadband, the
government could parcel out a bunch of $10 million research
grants to cities that come up with a viable plan to bring fiberoptic lines to their citizens. The handful of cities with the best
plans could then be eligible for $100 million in funds to fully
build out their ideas.
This funding scheme probably wouldn't work as quickly to
stimulate the economy. We'd probably create a lot more jobs in
the short run if the government just handed out $20 billion to a
single contractor to build a national health-records system. That's
how the Census Bureau went about its plan to arm its datacollectors with PDAs rather than clipboards. But guess what—
they're still using clipboards.
television
She's Got Legs
Eliza Dushku in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.
By Troy Patterson
Dollhouse (Fox, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), created by Buffy the
Vampire Slayer maestro Joss Whedon, stars Buffy alumna Eliza
Dushku as a sort-of Stepford wife, a not-quite Nikita. The
character, named Echo—like the Narcissus-type nymph and the
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Marvel Comics supervamp samurai—has an obscure past and a
nonexistent present. An "Active" controlled by a stealth
organization, she lives as a supple puppet without a real memory
or a stable consciousness. Regularly brainwashed and
reprogrammed by a computer geek with an indie-rock haircut,
protected by a dark-skinned handler to whom the script allots
just the slightest Driving Miss Daisy-ing, manipulated by a head
honcho with the viciously posh accent of Olivia Williams, she is
whatever the Dollhouse's ultrarich clients want her to be. "Where
I come from, we called them 'hookers,' " Lisa de Moraes has
quipped in the Washington Post. "Whatever."
Prostitution is indeed on the bill. Echo functions as a classy
motorcycle-racing escort, as an outdoorsy rock-climbing escort,
as a thief pretending to be a trashy thigh-high-boot-wearing
escort. But her superiors also, for some reason, seem to program
her as an Alpine midwife, and she has great potential as a killing
machine. In her downtime, she is supposed to be oblivious to her
dirty deeds—glitch, natch—and further unaware of the Actives
who have gone rogue in order to work on the show's body count
and of the dull, dull, dull FBI agent working the Dollhouse case.
No, she is a sweet moron who doesn't know what prison is and
believes that a Picasso portrait looks "broken." "You are a
talking cucumber" is one character's generous assessment.
Living communally with her fellow Actives in a comfortably
appointed secret lair, she invariably slips into a tank top and
yoga pants after stepping out of the unisex shower.
With Echo presenting two or three distinct reverberations per
episode, the role would seem to require an actor of great
dexterity, and Eliza Dushku is not exactly Toni Collette or Cate
Blanchett. However, Eliza Dushku is exactly Eliza Dushku, and
that is not a slight achievement. She powers convincingly along
here as a scream queen, a comic naïf, a Sydney Bristow-level
gunslinger, and a trembling faun—and also whenever she shows
a lot of leg, which is obviously as often as possible, maybe more
often than possible. Dushku, who is also an executive producer
on the show, has already done wonders for her demo reel, but
merely donning Sarah Palin drag to convey the personality of a
tough negotiator in a kidnapping case will not cut it, and it will
be a test of her abilities to reach the existential depths to which
the show aspires. The Williams character kicks off the pilot with
some blather about the distinction between being and seeming,
and someone else, by way of clearing up that Cubism issue,
says, "That's what art's for—to show us who we are." Correct!
But nonresponsive.
Crucially, Dushku always conveys both joy in performing and
vulnerability as a performer, and the combination incites
protective and possessive feelings from viewers. We want to
take care of her, but in order to want to take care of her, we need
to see that she wants our care, that she is being abused.
Dollhouse asks questions about the exploitation of women in
general and actresses in particular—and might even come to
answer them with rich ambiguity. What is a starlet but a person
who lives in an odd colony, pampered but imprisoned, emptying
her head out after every job, possibly robbed of her selfhood
without an awareness of the theft? Do Actives dream of insipid
sheep? And what, exactly, does the passive audience dream
about Dushku's body and Echo's soul? While the show's
ostentatious and superficial philosophizing ranks high among the
qualities bogging down the three episodes I've seen, it might,
almost despite itself, be engaging questions of identity and
media in a perverse and nifty fashion.
Though the show is quick and exciting in its particulars, slick
and captivating in its details, it is unfolding slowly as a whole,
with perhaps one too many investigations, conspiracies, returnof-the-repressed traumas, and busy backstories curling leisurely
into view. Will that pace test the patience of the remarkable cult
of Joss Whedon? After all, when TV connoisseurs hear that
producer J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost) is creating a new show, most
will perk their ears at least long enough to hear what he has to
say. When they get wind of a project from Josh Schwartz (The
O.C., Gossip Girl), a sizable number will start drooling in
anticipation and, wetting a finger with this saliva, test that wind
to see which way it blows. Meanwhile, Whedon elicits not just
steady curiosity but high passion, and the Dollhouse reviews
from sharp critics less abnormal than I are lukewarm so far. But
if you can cleanse your mind of expectations, then Dollhouse
stands all of a sudden as the best action show on network
television.
television
Futon Follies
The CollegeHumor Show brings college humor to MTV.
By Troy Patterson
The CollegeHumor Show (MTV, Sundays at 9:30 p.m. ET) isn't
actually about college, but nor was its debut episode particularly
humorous, so let's not get too hung up on nomenclature. A
shaggy synthesis of workplace sitcom and absurdist sketch
show, the program purports to take us behind the scenes of
CollegeHumor.com, which has been serving funny video clips
reliably since 1999, when its founders were still in high school.
Working on location in the site's real Manhattan office, moptopped editor-in-chief Ricky Van Veen and the core members of
his staff play themselves, roles they don't seem entirely cut out
for.
The bread and butter of CollegeHumor on the Web is pop
parody, college boy humor of the sort informed by a little
learning about the comedic uses of Modernism, a lot of close
study of The Simpsons, and vast tracks of leisure time spent
sitting on a futon talking smack. In their original videos—which
often bring in trained performers to help desecrate a broad swath
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of cultural touchstones—these twentysomethings have generated
ha-has at the same level as their elders at the sites Funny or Die
(though without the same interest in politics) and The Lonely
Island (though without the same tacit, polymorphously perverse
approach to sex).
Greatest and latest hits include a deadpan Dadaist take on Mad
Men that twits the self-seriousness of that new sacred cow and a
reimagining of a Will Smith sitcom that gets its heat from the
friction between the integrationist ideals of some hip-hop artists
and the minstrel-show sociopathology of their peers. In "Mad
Libs Men," when Don Draper says, with his wince, "Campbell, I
want you to work with two partners on this project—Peggy and
this smelly red microwave," Campbell scoffs that he's not
working with a woman, and the spoof of vicarious sexism is
perfect. Meanwhile, when the bling-mouthed protagonist of
"Fresh Prince Theme: Gangsta Version" rages against resettling
in Bel Air—"Yo, fuck Uncle Phil and his high tax bracket / I
ain't got a sports jacket and Carlton's a faggot"—a couple ideas
about the slumming of cultural tourism go tumbling. Elsewhere,
in "Brohemian Rhapsody," CollegeHumor assesses the beery
atmosphere of campus life by rewriting the Queen classic, a
project with a high degree of difficulty all these years after
Wayne and Garth banged their heads to it. Staggering around a
party with a Solo cup in hand, its central figure croons, "Damn
you Gamma Pi! / I sometimes wish I never had pledged at all."
The number is clever enough to crack up the very baseballcapped fatheads whose frat-pig ideology it mocks.
If any theme connects those three clips, it is a gleaming
aggression. The same unruliness animates the videos in the
"Hardly Working" series of Web bits that dovetail with the TV
show. Last week, they reconstructed Christian Bale's on-set
Terminator tantrum, with the difference that the offended
thespian was wearing, for reasons blissfully unexplained, a frog
costume. Also, the Bale figure changed his tune when he got a
satisfactory answer from the errant crew member: "You're not
tryin' to ruin my scene? ... I'm sorry."
But on the tube, CollegeHumor does not reach such giddy
heights, possibly because it is more interested in the comedy of
embarrassment than in farces of hostility. It is perhaps too
collegial. Notably, the debut episode did perk up whenever cast
member Amir Blumenfeld, whose owlish mien contrasts nicely
with his aggro demeanor, started acting out and when the face of
Sarah Schneider was serially shoved into plates of food. But
most of its nonsense was, unfortunately, just a whole lot of
nonsense. The plot concerned Van Veen's vanity and his attempt
to mollify his entitled staffers with office perks including a
Mexican food stand among the cubicles and the installation of a
play center filled with plastic balls, as in a McDonaldland.
Not incidentally, that vague satire of quirky corporate benefit
points toward the most perplexing thing about CollegeHumor's
awkward transition to the tube. The amateurism of the
performances, which gives the show a feel of simultaneously
trying too hard and not trying at all, is one thing, and the
sloppiness of the plotting is almost endearing. But to sit in your
living room and see these young people cavorting freely under
fluorescent-tube lights is jarring, as if this show had been
unearthed in a time capsule buried in the year 2000, as if—forget
the recession—the tech bubble had never burst. It wouldn't be
fair to expect The CollegeHumor Show to meld the comic dread
of The Office with the surreality of 30 Rock, but if a farce about
the workplace is to have any edge, then it at least needs to take
the psychology of cubicle life seriously and save the lazy
gamboling for a day of Frisbee on the quad.
the big idea
The Case for Bankers
They're not all villainous scum. And besides, we really need them.
By Jacob Weisberg
Not long ago, American culture abhorred lawyers, mistrusted
journalists, and envied bankers. Today we ignore lawyers, pity
journalists, and despise anyone connected to Wall Street—for
undermining their own companies, trashing the global economy,
and being insanely overpaid. Public sentiment has judged the lot
of them guilty as hell and sentenced them indefinitely to a midsix-figure stockade.
This reaction is understandable but hardly rational. While our
financial system as a whole has been revealed to be deeply
flawed—underregulated, overleveraged, plagued by reliance on
faulty models and assumptions and suffering from horrendous
conflicts of interest at the rating agencies and elsewhere—most
bankers deserve the new loathing no more than they did the old
fawning. What's more, the opprobrium being heaped on a sector
essential to our long-term economic vitality may well be making
matters worse.
One obvious point is being lost in the rush to flagellate Wall
Street: The vast majority of toilers in the financial vineyards had
nothing to do with the catastrophe. Most are themselves victims
of poor judgments they didn't make, didn't know about, and
would not have understood if they had known about them. The
current crisis came about through a toxic cocktail of reckless
lending into a government-subsidized real estate bubble and
misjudgments about the risk of complex financial instruments.
There were other factors, too. But only a small fraction of those
employed on Wall Street worked in areas connected to the big
failures. At Wells Fargo, the largest subprime lender in 2007,
mortgage specialists amounted to 10,000 out of 160,000
employees. At Citi, Lehman, Merrill, and Bear Stearns, the
proportion was far smaller. Even within the units that helped to
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blow up big firms, the damage was done by a minority within
the minority.
As an illustration, take the insurance behemoth AIG, which was
saved from extinction by an $85 billion government credit line
and is now effectively nationalized, with the Federal Reserve
holding an 80 percent stake. On his TV program Mad Money,
Jim Cramer said of AIG's employees (before later apologizing),
"We should hound them in the supermarket. We should hound
them in the ballpark. We should hound them everywhere they
are. We should make fun of them, and we should point fingers at
them, and we should tell them … You have no shame."
If you want to sputter, choke, and turn purple with rage at the
people who wrecked your retirement, you might start with
Cramer himself, the most prolific dispenser of bad advice to the
investing public. But if you're looking for someone in the
securities industry, you'd be justified in directing your outrage at
Joseph Cassano, who ran the London-based AIG Financial
Products subsidiary. As explained in a superb New York Times
piece last fall, his 377-employee unit issued $500 billion in
credit-default swaps—insurance against default on mortgagebacked securities. Losses on these once wildly profitable
instruments led to collateral calls that undermined AIG's credit
rating and thereby threatened the global financial system so
seriously that the Fed had to step in. But even if you assume
every one of those 377 employees in that London office—the
receptionists, the HR specialists, the IT guys—share Cassano's
responsibility for downing AIG—and throw in the firm's top
management and board of directors to boot—you're looking at
less than 1 percent of the firm's 116,000 employees spread
among 130 countries.
A week after the bailout, several members of Congress caught
wind of AIG spending $440,000 for a retreat for top insurance
agents at a fancy California resort and reacted as if Bernie
Madoff were throwing a ball for Charles Ponzi at Versailles. But
as AIG executives not unreasonably pointed out, their ordinary
insurance business was profitable, and the people who were
making the money for them had no connection to the derivatives
madness in London. If the company, which we taxpayers now
own, is going to return to profitability, it's going to have to carry
on with its ordinary business. Like it or not, that business
rewards successful salespeople in ways that appliance repair
doesn't.
The same point goes for financial compensation generally—the
2008 bonuses that the president has declared "shameful" and the
salaries that he is attempting to cap for recipients of federal help.
On the larger point, that the gap between executive pay and the
pay of working people is a moral scandal, Obama is surely
correct. Financial firms have failed in part because they
rewarded people in ways that encouraged them to serve their
own interests at the expense of shareholders, a hazard
economists refer to as the principal-agent problem. Moreover,
grotesque rewards for banking jobs are themselves an illustration
of how the market can misallocate resources, sending too many
intelligent people to chase diminishing returns in financial
intermediation and away from more economically productive
(and stimulating and fulfilling) pursuits. But even under a
different system, we will need an energetic and creative financial
class, and shooting the wounded won't help us get one back.
The current peasant revolt, which blurs indignation at the
underlying inequities and the search for culprits in the
catastrophe, has been far too categorical. Let's say you work for
a bank in the more prosaic areas of consumer banking, private
wealth management, corporate underwriting, investment
banking, credit cards, or trading. You might well have had a
poor year last year and seen your bonus vanish. But you also
may have worked hard, managed risk effectively, and earned
money for your firm that was wiped out by losses in esoteric
forms of finance. It may be reasonable to deny anyone at a
money-losing business a bonus, but it's irrational and malicious
to suggest that one and all deserve a scarlet letter. Governmentmandated salary caps risk institutionalizing failure, creating new
perverse incentives, and deterring talent when it is most needed.
A CEO who can turn around Citigroup—which could save tens
of billions in taxpayer funds—is worth a lot more than $500,000.
If punishing all for the sins of a few is unfair, it is also likely to
prove counterproductive. The economy will grow again only
with a revival of what John Maynard Keynes called the "animal
spirits" of financiers and capitalists. Bankers have to be willing
to lend money and risk their capital again. If we want to get
them back in the game, we'd best not humiliate them at the
supermarket.
the chat room
Courtroom Confidential
Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick take your questions on the state-secrets
privilege and other tough issues facing Obama's Justice Department.
Slate senior editors and legal writers Emily Bazelon and Dahlia
Lithwick were online at Washingtpost.com to chat with readers
about the thorny issues the Obama Justice Department has
inherited from Bush, including the new administration's
apparent adherence to Bush's state-secrets privilege. An
unedited transcript of the chat follows.
New York, N.Y.: Is it possible the reason for Obama's defense
of the Bush version of the state secret doctrine is so a court
(maybe, The Court) can definitively reject it? I'm grasping for
straws here...
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Dahlia Lithwick: Hi there New York and hallo everyone!
Thanks for signing on today. New York I am all for grasping at
straws but I doubt the Obama Administration has high hopes that
the John Roberts court is the place to turn for decisions to curtail
Executive Branch excesses. It would have been far easier to
simply jettison the state secrets privilege or go back to using it in
a limited way. No, I think I agree with those who believe the
Obama Team either didn't take the time and think this one
through, or has some complicated international-diplomacy
rationale for wanting to keep this case under wraps. That said it
would be nice if some court someplace took this issue on.
(345 U.S. 1). A military airplane, a B-29 Superfortress bomber,
crashed. The widows of three civilian crew members sought
accident reports on the crash but were told that to release such
details would threaten national security by revealing the
bomber's top-secret mission. The court held that only the
government can claim or waive the privilege, and it 'is not to be
lightly invoked', and last there 'must be a formal claim of
privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has
control over the matter, after actual personal consideration by
that officer.' The court stressed that the decision to withhold
evidence is to be made by the presiding judge and not the
executive."
_______________________
New York: Hello, Emily and Dahlia—I appreciate Dahlia's
analysis of why Obama's DOJ might continue to spew the old
Bush state-secrets arguments. But has anyone actually posed this
question to Attorney Gen. Eric Holder? Saying that they're reevaluating these cases doesn't speak to why the privelege is
being used so expansively in Mohamed v. Jeppesen. Thanks.
Emily Bazelon: You're right, it doesn't. Holder hasn't answered
this question, as far as I know. Clearly the administration has
decided, at this point, that the review of the state secrets
privilege in all the cases won't change its mind in this case. I
suppose that could change down the line, but for procedural
reasons I doubt it. It would have been easy for the govt to ask for
a continuance before the Ninth Circuit. Changing the position it
took in court this week would be odder, and confusing.
As a footnote to the founding case establishing the privilege, in
2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and it
was found that the argument was fraudulent, and there was no
secret information. The reports did, however, contain
information about the poor state of condition of the aircraft
itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air
Force's case. Many commentators have alleged government
misuse of secrecy in the landmark case.
Emily Bazelon: Yes, you're right. A few years ago, I edited a
great piece by Michael Freedman about U.S. v. Reynolds and
how it came to light that the govt was really engaged in a cover
up, not some worthy protection of state secrets.
This month, Garry Wills has a good review of two new books
about Reynolds, in the New York Review of Books. The history
makes clear that this is not a doctrine with honorable origins.
_______________________
_______________________
New York, N.Y.: Is it possible that we're just seeing the dead
hand of the Bush Justice Dept. at work, and that Obama's people
hadn't yet had a chance to restaff and articulate their new
policies when this argument was made?
Emily Bazelon: I don't think so. The Obama lawyers are really
smart, and some of them were part of the transition. Also, some
of them had been thinking about this case, as academics or
practitioners, during the Bush administration. And if they'd just
wanted to buy themselves time to make sure they understood all
the details and issues specific to this case—the classified aspects
they didn't know about until they got into office—they could
have just asked the court for more time.
_______________________
Princeton, N.J.: Well, Obama flunked his first test on the State
Secrets Doctrine. Here the Wikipedia entry. Note the second
paragraph:
Arlington, Va.: Seeing as how the President is a former law
professor, do you think it is likely that he will look to academia
for at least one of his expected Supreme Court appointments. For
example, a Cass Sunstein (who was appointed to head OIRA)?
Dahlia Lithwick: Hi Arlington.
I think there is a VERY good chance that Obama will look to
appoint someone to the Supreme Court who does not come off
the federal bench, although he has some pretty terrific candidates
there. Whether he picks an academic like Sunstein or Elena
Kagan (his pick for Solicitor General) or someone from a
completely different walk of life, and he has pointed to Earl
Warren as an ideal justice. Warren, recall, came out of the
governor's office. I think that when Obama talks about empathy
in a jurist he is flicking at the idea that he wants someone who
has lived in the real world and engaged with real people and
brings that perspective to the court.
_______________________
"The privilege was first officially recognized by the U.S.
Supreme Court in a 1953 decision, United States v. Reynolds
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Montreal: Is there a real possibility that courts in other
countries indict former U.S. officials for war crimes and if so
what do you believe would be (should be?) the reaction in the
U.S.?
even if you're not keeping your house.
Dahlia Lithwick: I think if you ask someone like Philippe
Sands, the British lawyer who wrote The Torture Team, there is
more than a real possibility, under the principle of universal
jurisdiction that people like Donald Rumsfeld and others who
approved the US interrogation policies will be prosecuted in
other countries. Especially now with Susan Crawford and Eric
Holder calling what was done to these prisoners "torture" it
becomes likely.
Obama voted against the 2005 bankruptcy bill. Reforming this
area of law is a natural reform for him to take on, given the
extent to which foreclosures are driving the economic downturn.
The means test also sometimes causes problems for people
seeking bankruptcy for medical reasons. It's hard to say what
Obama will push for first right now, since we don't know much
about his plan to combat foreclosures. And the reform of
bankruptcy law has opponents with lots of money behind them,
like the credit card companies, as we saw when it fell out of the
first round of TARP legislation. But now the Democrats should
have the power to make some of these reforms happen.
_______________________
_______________________
Bethesda, Md.: Do you think that, in order to show a true
respect for the law, the White House should cooperate in a full
investigation of any potential crimes by the previous
administration? Because it seems like in order for the law to
have merit, it has to apply all the time, not just when it's
politically expedient.
Washington, D.C.: So what's next in challenging the use of the
state secrets privilege? Is the current round over?
Dahlia Lithwick: Well Bethesda, I couldn't agree more. The
problem I have with the (apparent) decision not to investigate
potential criminal wrongdoing in the previous administration, is
that I hear few LEGAL arguments to support it. I hear a lot of
pragmatic arguments: people don't want it; the economy is too
bad; it would tear the country apart; the wrongdoers meant well .
. . but no legal ones. Like you I feel that if we can invent reasons
not to look into the wrongdoing at the highest levels, it becomes
hard to justify prosecuting bankrobbers or drug dealers.
Another state secrets case in the pipeline is that of Maher Arar,
another detainee who experienced extraordinary rendition—he
was flown to Syria, and tortured there. The Canadian govt has
apologized to him and paid him $10 million in damages. The
U.S. govt (the Bush administration) founght his civil suit in
court. The full 2nd Circuit reheard Arar's case in December. The
new administration could tell the court that it doesn't have to
make a ruling, because the government is going to settle with
Arar. And as part of the settlement, the government could agree
to disclose some of the evidence covered by the invocation of
the state secrets privilege.
_______________________
Pensacola, Fla.: In today's tumultuous economic times when
Americans are struggling with home foreclosures and credit
debt, will the Obama Administration make a push to abolish the
"means test" as a prerequisite in Federal Bankruptcy Courts?
Emily Bazelon: Obama certainly called for getting rid of the
means test during the campaign. The way the means test
currently works—as a result of the changes Congress made in
2005, which made it harder to file for bankruptcy—is that you
undergo a means test if you're filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. T
he court assesses your income level and expenses. Then if you
don't qualify, you have to file under Chapter 13 instead of
Chapter 7, which means that you have to set up a plan for
repaying your creditors.
As I understand it, if the administration wants to modify the
terms of housing loans to give people relief on their mortgages,
the means test is a problem. That's because it doesn't allow for
the deduction of mortgage payments from monthly expenses,
Emily Bazelon: Next is a couple of fronts. In the Jeppesen case,
the Ninth Circuit will rule, and that will determine the next stage
of litigation about how the rule is imposed.
Then there is Holder's review of all 39 of the Bush uses of the
privilege. It will be really interesting to see which cases the new
administration changes course on, and which, like Jeppesen, it
doesn't.
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: I was gravely disappointed by the John
Roberts appointment as Chief Justice. Can President Obama
nominate someone as chief justice, as opposed to an associate
judge? Can the position be taken away?
Dahlia Lithwick: Washington. My question back to you would
be: why does it matter who the chief is? He only gets one vote
after all! His powers are wholly administrative. And whatever
your views on Roberts, you would, I think, have to say he's been
incredibly fair about assigning opinions and running conference
(powers abused by Warren Burger in his time). Being chief has
more to do with being fair and organized than ideology and
Roberts is both.
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_______________________
Alexandria, Va.: I think the problem with investigating
outgoing administrations is that it will start a trend...with each
incoming administration (of a different party) investigating the
previous one. Good grief...if we didn't prosecute Nixon for his
crimes because of the good of the country (pardon
notwithstanding, I don't think he would have been prosecuted)
then I think we should just leave the Bush administration to the
history books and get on good governance by the Obama
administration.
Emily Bazelon: Your argument has merit. Expending a lot of
energy on investigating the past makes a lot of people nervous—
including President Obama and AG Holder. There's some
complexity here, however. The administration clearly has
decided not to launch full-bore criminal investigations. But does
that mean that it also refuses to disclose information that might
lead to such investigations, simply to prevent them? There are
ongoing lawsuits that raise these questions; Congress is also
asking them, most recently via Sen. Leahy's call for a truth
commission. My point is that even if you don't want a big and
messy investigation, you might want to think about whether
drawing a veil over the whole last eight years is also a mistake.
_______________________
New York: What do you think is the legal future for gay rights
during the Obama administration?
Emily Bazelon: I think much of the next stage of gay rights is
going to play out without much involvement by the Obama
administration. This government is not going to get behind the
gay marriage movement. But that doesn't mean the courts or
state legislatures won't confront these questions. There was an
interesting ruling in the Ninth Cirucuit last week, calling into
question the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.
These developments stem from cases brought by gay couples.
They are forcing the questions they care about—which is one of
the ways change is made.
lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of
Justice wrote memos approving tactics like waterboarding, the
people who relied on that advice have a good defense.
_______________________
Elena Kagan + Bush doctrine: I was upset with what appeared
to be Kagan's endorsement yesterday of Bush-era policies. Was
she simply describing the law as she perceives it to be or is she
really endorsing the divine rights and above-any-law status of
the Presidency at least as far as the designation of "enemy
combatants" goes?
Dahlia Lithwick: I wasn't at Kagan's hearing but the accounts I
have read suggest that she wasn't saying anything much different
than Eric Holder said at his: that she believed the President could
hold suspected terrorists without trial as war prisoners. In Hamdi
in 2004, the high court agreed with the Bush administration that
prisoners captured on the battlefield can be held for the duration
of the war. We don't know much about what they thought
beyond that, but I suspect Kagan was just stating what she
believes the law to be.
_______________________
Winnipeg, Canada: What's the current state of habeas corpus in
your country? Has the Obama team reinstated it yet?
Emily Bazelon: The Obama team halted the military
commissions system for reviewing the enemy combatant status
of the Guantanamo detainees. It hasn't said yet exactly how it
plans to handle all the habeas petitions the detainees brought to
try to show that they're not enemy combatants. Essentially, the
whole thing is on ice for a little while. But that will change
pretty soon, probably this spring, as the administration begins to
make court appearances in individual cases. Basically, we can
expect that the administration will not adopt the Bush position
that the detainees have no habeas rights. But that doesn't
determine how it will handle all the different cases.
_______________________
_______________________
Washington, D.C.: How would keeping the worst of the Bush
administration's secrets hidden defer awkward questions about
prosecuting the wrongdoers? Once the United States admits that
the "not-so-bad" acts like waterboarding are torture, doesn't the
United States have an obligation to prosecute the wrongdoers?
Emily Bazelon: Not necessarily. Identifying who exactly did
what wrong is really hard, for starters. Also, prosecutors always
have discretion. Political pressure for a prosecution can build,
but in the end, the govt has to decide whether to throw its
resources behind a criminal indictment. And in this case, where
Washington, D.C.: Are there ANY Bush legal policies you
wouldn't be in favor of Obama overturning?
Emily Bazelon: Well of course the Bush administration took
positions in thousands of cases that weren't political in nature,
and won't change with a new administration. If you're talking
about the Supreme Court's docket this year, I don't think that the
Obama DoJ should shift position in a couple of important voting
rights cases.
_______________________
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Washington, D.C.: Republicans should have done it in 2000
with Clinton...lets see, he started rendition, sold state secrets to
China, committed perjury, White Water...etc.
Gore-ish Chicken Littles. Scientists who study the cryosphere,
however, say that the latest data on sea ice does nothing to refute
global warming—unless you willfully misread it.
I think people with Bush Derangement Syndrome is the political
version of OCD...get help
Before we go on, let's start with Sea Ice 101. Millions of square
miles of the stuff blanket both the Arctic Ocean and Southern
(aka Antarctic) Ocean, with large swathes of it melting away
each summer and refreezing in the winter. Sea ice can be
measured in terms of its thickness and its extent—the total area
of ocean covered by at least a 15 percent concentration of ice.
Dahlia Lithwick: Washington. We have had a raft of questions
today saying, in effect, that what the Bush Administration did to
its prisoners was just not that bad. But having heard over and
over that it's liberals who are moral relativists, I am still shocked
when people equate authorizing water-boarding with perjury
about sex with an intern. I wish we could look back at what
happened in the Bush Justice Department without accusing one
another of derangement syndromes. I don't think its irrational or
ideological or deranged to believe that there should be
accountability for that.
_______________________
he wants someone who has lived in the real world and
engaged with real people and brings that perspective to the
court. : How about Ralph Nader? (just kidding)
Dahlia Lithwick: I think that if Ralph Nader were a woman he'd
have a better chance. Vegas sportsbooks say the next nominee is
very very likely to be a woman.
Thanks folks for chatting with us! It's always a pleasure.
the green lantern
Is the Cryosphere Crying Wolf?
What Arctic sea-ice levels can tell us about global warming.
By Nina Shen Rastogi
What's going on with Arctic sea ice? First I heard that it's all
melting away, and that this was an early warning sign of
global warming on the march. Now I'm hearing that Arctic
ice levels have miraculously rebounded. Which is it? And if
it's true that sea ice is growing, does that mean we can stop
worrying about global warming?
For the past month or so, news has been circulating around the
Internet that global levels of sea ice—i.e., the floating ice that
forms on top of ocean water—are back to where they were in
1979. In particular, Arctic sea ice, which was supposed to be
melting rapidly, reportedly "rebounded" in 2008. This argument,
which originated on the Website Daily Tech, rests in large part
on the reported "rebounding" of Arctic sea ice in 2008 and is
being held up by climate-change contrarians as a "gotcha" to Al
Arctic sea ice behaves very differently from its Antarctic
brethren, largely because the two regions' geographies are so
different. Arctic sea ice tends to get most of the attention from
pundits and scientists because its levels are changing more
rapidly, particularly in the summer. Over the past 30 years, the
ice cover that remains at the end of the melt season has dropped
11.1 percent per decade—or about 915,000 square miles every
10 years—relative to seasonal averages from 1979 to 2000. As
you may recall from various news reports, the summer of 2007
was a particularly dire one, as Arctic sea ice reached the lowest
minimum extent ever recorded. Last year wasn't far behind.
Antarctic sea ice, on the other hand, hasn't exhibited much
change—in fact, its annual extent has actually been increasing a
little, by about 0.8 percent per decade. (As Brendan I. Koerner
stated in this previous Green Lantern, no one really knows why
this is the case—although it may actually be a surprising effect
of rising temperatures in the area.)
Now, let's go back to the Daily Tech article. It states: "Earlier
this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt
entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial
recovery." First of all, the predictions that the article refers to
were in regard to summer sea ice—no one is claiming that the
Arctic will see ice-free Christmases anytime soon. Also, the
scientific community isn't nearly as unified as the article
suggests; predictions as to when those watery Arctic summers
might commence range anywhere from 2013 to 2100. Some
scientists said it was possible that the summer of 2008 would be
ice-free, but those statements weren't made as decisively as the
Daily Tech piece asserts.
As for the "substantial recovery" claim—well, sea ice always
"recovers" in the winter, in the sense that it grows back after it
melts. And, yes, September 2008 did show more ice than
September 2007—but the Lantern would argue that going from
the worst summer on record to the second-worst is nothing to
crow about.
The period between September and December 2008—the first
months of the freezing season—did see more rapid growth than
usual. The Daily Tech piece is correct in chalking that growth
up, in part, to the fact that this new ice had less insulating snow
cover. (Less snow cover means more exposure to cold air
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temperatures.) Recent data suggest, however, that this growth
has slowed. January 2009 showed the sixth-lowest Arctic extent
on record for any January since 1979, and right now, with about
a month left in the 2008-2009 freezing season, Arctic ice extent
is lagging well below 1979-2000 seasonal averages. Plus, the
Arctic ice pack as a whole is much younger and thinner than it
was decades ago, meaning large areas are vulnerable to melting
out in the summer.
The "miraculous recovery" argument makes the classic mistake
of confusing short-term changes with long-term trends. The rate
at which sea ice melts or freezes is determined by a complex mix
of variables: not just atmospheric temperature but also wind
patterns, ocean currents, saline levels, and the amount of open
water surrounding the ice. So looking at a single data point is
bound to skew your analysis if you ignore the clear and
persistent long-term changes, as this blog post wittily
demonstrates.
The Daily Tech piece also sows confusion about the meaning of
global ice levels. In a global-warming scenario, it's possible that
Antarctic sea ice might rise as Arctic sea ice plummets. Looking
at the combined ice area of both regions doesn't tell us much
about the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions, as this response
to the Daily Tech item—written by the scientists whose data the
piece cites—explains.
But the North Pole is so far away, you say. Why should I care
that the ice up there is melting? Well, besides the fact that our
friends the polar bears live on those ice floes, the loss of sea ice
means that the ocean gets warmer. Highly reflective sea ice
bounces most solar radiation back into space, while darker ocean
water absorbs it. Not only do higher water temperatures cause
even more sea ice to melt (a classic example of a positive
feedback loop), but it may also speed the melting of the Arctic
permafrost, releasing tons of methane and carbon dioxide along
the way. Scientists are still trying to figure out what the impacts
of melting polar ice will be on the middle latitudes, but they may
range from reduced rainfall in the American West to increased
winter precipitation in Europe.
The most immediate and visible effect, though, might be a
political one. As summer ice rapidly declines in the Arctic,
valuable shipping routes are beginning to open up, as is the
seabed itself, with its tantalizing promise of vast untapped
resources—perhaps as much as 90 billion barrels of oil and 1.7
trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves. Russia has already
begun rattling its sabers in an attempt to claim the territory, and
other nations, such as Canada and the United States, are quickly
following suit. The environmental impact of drilling in the
Arctic? Well, that's a topic for another column.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to [email protected], and check this
space every Tuesday.
the has-been
Straight Change We Can Believe In
How baseball can usher out the A-Roid era.
By Bruce Reed
In spite of itself, baseball remains the national pastime—so it's
only fitting that with America mired in crisis, the game would
find a way to do the same. Alex Rodriguez's belated confession
that he used steroids from 2001 to 2003, along with Miguel
Tejada's guilty plea for lying to Congress about an ex-teammate*
and Barry Bonds' upcoming trial for perjury, has brought Major
League Baseball to the tipping point. Almost 100 years ago, a
renegade group of baseball owners launched the short-lived
Federal League. Soon, it will be possible to do that again, and
sell the naming rights to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
As Tim Marchman points out, no one is shedding any tears for
A-Rod, whose career earnings of around $1 million for each
forevermore-in-doubt home run make him one of the highestpaid liars in American history. But as William Saletan explains,
A-Rod is just the tip of the juiceberg: In 2003, 103 players failed
the same test as he did. That's one out of every eight players, or
about three per franchise. Baseball now must confront a Wall
Street-size systemic failure: What do you do with everybody
when it turns out that, in fact, everybody did it?
Both baseball owners (who looked the other way through the ARoid era) and the players' union (which covered for it) will be
tempted to ride out the current storm, confident that the longterm fundamentals of the game are sound. They don't know how
much the economic downturn will hurt their bottom line, but the
past few years have brought record attendance, strong profits,
eye-popping salaries, and plenty of genuine excitement.
But with the revelation that at least one-eighth of its players and
most of its marquee stars were (and might still be) faking it, the
World Series now looks more like World Wrestling
Entertainment. Once the 103 names of A-Rod's fellow failures
become known—along with countless others bound to emerge in
the Bonds trial and inevitable congressional investigations—
major league rosters will resemble the balance sheets of major
banks. The Yankees have A-Rod on contract for the next nine
years, and no matter how often he apologizes, he'll still be the
sporting world's biggest toxic asset.
Without a sharp break in its culture, baseball risks becoming the
American equivalent of the Tour de France, a beautiful sport no
longer trusted to be on the level. As a prominent White Sox fan
might say, baseball needs change we can believe in.
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To clean up its act, Major League Baseball must adapt a strategy
of shock and awe, instead of surprise and denial:
First, the league needs to change the culture of baseball by
punishing steroid use as a team crime, not just an individual one.
When the NCAA finds major violations involving a college
player, the player isn't the only one to face sanctions; the college
can be ruled ineligible for post-season play. Major League
Baseball should apply the same principle to steroid use: If a
player tests positive, the player will be suspended for the
season—and the team will be barred from taking part in the
playoffs or the World Series.
After Rodriguez's confession, Rangers team owner Tom Hicks
said he felt "betrayed" by A-Rod's actions, and the Yankees no
doubt feel the same way. No matter how genuine those feelings,
let's face it: The culture of baseball rewarded everyone—the
commissioner, owners, managers, players, sportswriters, fans—
for looking the other way. That culture will change in a hurry if
everyone in the system has everything to lose by looking the
other way.
Second, to stop its currency from being permanently devalued,
baseball needs to save the Hall of Fame for heroes. For more
than 100 years, baseball has been one long friendly argument
about statistics—which ones mattered most and which players,
teams, and eras measured up best. Thanks to steroids, the game
is now an experiment with a decade or more of bad data. The
sabermetricians can't even tell us how much of Barry Bonds'
head size is real, let alone how many of his 762 home runs
would have cleared the fence in any other era.
If I were commissioner of baseball, I'd ask the Hall of Fame
board to put every player found to have used steroids onto the
permanently ineligible list. For my money, Barry Bonds is one
of the three greatest hitters in history, along with Babe Ruth and
Ted Williams. But if he is guilty as charged, the Hall of Fame is
not the place to honor him. Likewise, A-Rod should not be
allowed to spend the next nine years trying to crawl into
Cooperstown by waging a war of contrition. He couldn't even
get through his first confession, to ESPN's Peter Gammons,
without touting his Hall of Fame credentials. Ironically, that may
be one reason he started taking steroids in the first place: to
bolster his case that he belongs among the greatest ever.
If baseball can't bring itself to enforce an across-the-board ban, it
should protect the integrity of the Hall of Fame another way.
Under the current system, players become eligible five years
after they retire. That's a strange way to assess a player's place in
history. We don't put presidents on stamps five years after
they've left office. In most fields, candidates for the Nobel Prize
have to wait decades for their achievements to be recognized.
As baseball tries to make sense of what went wrong over the
past decade, it should lengthen the Hall of Fame waiting period
to 10 or 20 years after retirement. That will give people time to
put the A-Roid era in perspective. And, besides, by then most
players should be out for good behavior.
Correction, Feb. 12, 2009: The article mistakenly stated that
Miguel Tejada lied to Congress about his own use of
performance-enhancing drugs. He is accused of giving false
statements about a teammate's use of the drugs. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
Major League Baseball can't rewrite the box scores from those
years. The only standard it can hold onto is the Baseball Hall of
Fame, its pantheon of heroes for the ages. The Hall of Fame will
never be perfect: Some mediocrities have snuck in over the
years, and some players who've been left out were more
deserving. But to fans, it still means something, and it means the
world to players. Pete Rose was banned from consideration for
gambling on his own team and has spent the past 20 years trying
to get in.
the spectator
Entry into the Hall is based not only on a player's greatness on
the field but also on "integrity, sportsmanship, [and] character."
Under the late MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti, the board of
directors of the Hall of Fame declared that Rose's crime rendered
him ineligible.
If I hadn't used the locution so recently, I would be certain to call
The Reader "The Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made."
In the past few years, the sportswriters whose votes determine
entry into the Hall of Fame have imposed a collective ban
against suspected steroid users. Mark McGwire, whose statistics
would otherwise make him a cinch for the Hall, received just 24
percent of the vote in his first two years of eligibility, and 22
percent% this year. But Commissioner Bud Selig has not said
whether illegal steroid use should trigger the character clause.
Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader
We don't need another "redemptive" Holocaust movie.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Somebody has to say it. I haven't seen others do so in print. And
if I'm not the perfect person to do so, I do have some expertise.
And so I will: This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust
is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in
the Final Solution. The fact that it was recently nominated for a
best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems
to believe that if it's a "Holocaust film," it must be worthy of
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approbation, end of story. And so a film that asks us to
empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that
"ordinary Germans" were ignorant of the extermination until
after the war, now stands a good chance of getting a golden
statuette.
take action until the successful Normandy invasion, when it
seemed Hitler would lose the war.
A deeply depressing indication of how the film misreads the
Holocaust can be found in a recent New York Times report on the
state of the Oscar race. The paper gave disproportionate
attention to The Reader by featuring a wistful-looking still of
Kate Winslet above the headline "Films About Personal
Triumphs Resonate With Viewers During Awards Season."
And then there was Cruise's character, Claus von Stauffenberg,
very brave, it's true, in 1944. But back during the brutal war
crime that was the 1939 invasion of Poland (the British
magazine History Today reminds us), he was describing the
Polish civilians his army was slaughtering as "an unbelievable
rabble" made up of "Jews and mongrels." With friends like these
...
What, exactly, was the Kate Winslet character's "personal
triumph"? While in prison for participation in an act of mass
murder that was particularly gruesome and personal, given the
generally impersonal extermination process—as a death camp
guard, she helped ensure 300 Jewish women locked in a burning
church would die in the fire—she taught herself to read! What a
heartwarming fable about the wonders of literacy and its ability
to improve the life of an Auschwitz mass murderer!
True, she's unrepentant for the most part about allowing those
women and children to burn to death. (Although we do see one
scene in which it turns out she's saved some pennies in prison
that she wants to be given to the children of the women she
murdered—thanks!) But most of what we see of her prison
experience is her excitement at her growing literacy skills. Get a
load of those pages turning! Reading is fun!
It's been argued that no fictional film can do justice to the events
of 1939-45, that only documentaries like Alan Resnais' Night
and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's nine-plus-hour-long Shoah can
begin to convey the reality of the evil. And there certainly have
been execrable failures (example: Life Is Beautiful). I've argued
that most of the fictionalized efforts either exhibit a false
redemptiveness or an offensive sexual exploitiveness—what
some critics have called "Nazi porn." But in recent years, a new
mode of misconstrual has prevailed—the desire to exculpate the
German people of guilt for the crimes of the Hitler era. I spoke
recently with Mark Weitzman, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center's New York office, who went so far as to say that The
Reader was a symptom of a kind of "Holocaust revisionism,"
which used to be the euphemistic term for Holocaust denial.
Weitzman mentioned three films in particular: In addition to The
Reader, there was Tom Cruise's Valkyrie, which gave the
impression that the Wehrmacht, the German army, was full of
good men and true (identifiable in the film by their British
accents) who had always opposed that lout Hitler with his whole
silly Jewish obsession, when in fact the more we learn about the
Wehrmacht's role, the more disgracefully complicit it turns out
to have been with the mass murderers of the SS. Yes, a few
Wehrmacht officers did plot against Hitler, but they waited to
"The Valkyrie conspiracy took place in 1944," Weitzman told
me. "If it had been 1941, it might have made a difference."
Moral: Don't go looking for heroes in the largely mythical
"German resistance" to Hitler. The German resistance was not
much more real or effectual than the French Resistance—its
legend outgrew its deeds after the war. (Although it is worth
seeking out the two movies about the tiny, brave-but-doomed,
Munich-based "White Rose" resistance, The White Rose and
Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, which tell the story of a few
students who didn't—like the Valkyrie conspirators—believe the
goal was to help Germany win the war more efficiently than
Hitler, but to bear moral witness against the exterminators. For
which they were brutally guillotined in Munich in 1943.)
The third film Weitzman mentions as an example of this soft
revisionism is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, one I haven't
been able to bring myself to see but that features a young
German boy, son of Nazi parents, who lives near a concentration
camp and befriends a young death camp "boy in striped
pajamas." The tale is not dissimilar in saccharine sentiment to
the recently revealed, Oprah-fied fraud about the girl who gave
the death camp boy apples, although it avoids the happy ending
of that treacly sham.
But at least they didn't give these two films Oscar nominations
or awards like the disgraceful one given to Life Is Beautiful.
Still, cumulatively, Weitzman believes they achieve a sinister
effect: "Where overt Holocaust denial has failed in America,"
Weitzman said, "the way it has not elsewhere, these films
represent a kind of Holocaust revisionism that misconstrues the
German role in it, which extended far beyond Hitler's circle."
(Which reminds me of another example, The Reader's partner in
exculpatory shame: Downfall, which did exactly that—make it
seem as though Hitler and Goebbels and a few others were the
source of all evil in Germany while the poor, unknowing
German people were victims, too. It's revolting.)
In this repellent form of revisionism, most Germans (you know,
the ones who helped bring Hitler to power, who enthusiastically
joined in his hysterical Jew-hatred and his pogroms, who
supported his mass deportations "to the East") were somehow
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ignorant of the extermination of the Jews going on "in the East."
They presumably noticed the disappearance of the Jews from
their midst (since they eagerly stole their apartments and
everything valuable the Jews were forced to leave behind). I
once confronted a spokesman for the German Consulate on a
panel in New York who was pushing a version of this line; he'd
referred to a recent poll that purported to show that the majority
of Germans alive at the time of the extermination had—
surprise!—no knowledge of it.
"What did they think?" I asked him. "The Jews all decided to go
on vacation and forgot to come home?"
Please, let's not allow films like The Reader to misrepresent
history by pretending the Germans—even those too young to
fight—didn't know what was going on until (as The Reader
would have it) after the war, when they learned about all the
troubling things that some of their fellow citizens did "in the
East."
Only then, the film asks us to believe, did these ordinary
Germans find themselves shocked, shocked at the mass murder,
the gassing, the industrialized killing. Germans had actually
participated? So hard to believe! So few clues!
In fact, one of the most damning documents I uncovered in
researching my book Explaining Hitler was a revelation that
appeared in a Munich anti-Hitler newspaper, the Münchener
Post, on Dec. 9, 1931. It had been lost to history until I found it
in the basement of a state archive. The courageous reporters of
the social-democratic paper had gotten hold of a secret Nazi
Party plan for the disposition of the Jews that first used what was
to become the widespread euphemism for extermination: "Final
Solution" (Endlössung), a word that left little doubt over the
mass murder it euphemized. I've written about the difficulties I
met with in trying to make their story into a film: Hollywood
resists Hitler-related movies when they lack "a happy ending."
But it's clear Germans could have known as early as 1931 (or
1926 if they'd bothered to read Mein Kampf).
They could have known if they'd read about the legal
dehumanization of Jews in the Nuremberg laws of 1935 or the
state-sponsored pogroms after Kristallnacht in 1938. And if they
happened to be illiterate as in The Reader (something Cynthia
Ozick dispatches as a fraudulent red-herring metaphoric excuse
in an essay that examined the book), they could have heard it
from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to
Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if
war started. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind, not merely
illiterate, to miss what Kate Winslet's character seems to have
missed (while serving as a guard at Auschwitz!). You'd have to
be exceedingly stupid. As dumb as the Oscar voters who
nominated The Reader because it was a "Holocaust film."
But that's what The Reader is about: the supposedly difficult
struggle with this slowly dawning postwar awareness. As
Cynthia Ozick put it in her essay: "After the war, when she is
brought to trial, the narrator ['Michael Berg'] acknowledges that
she is guilty of despicable crimes—but he also believes that her
illiteracy must mitigate her guilt. Had she been able to read, she
would have been a factory worker, not an agent of murder. Her
crimes are illiteracy's accident. Illiteracy is her exculpation."
Indeed, so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of
illiteracy—despite the fact that burning 300 people to death
doesn't require reading skills—that some worshipful accounts of
the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps
because it's been declared "classic" and "profound") actually
seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of
than participating in mass murder. From the Barnes & Noble
Web site summary of the novel: "Michael recognizes his former
lover on the stand, accused of a hideous crime. And as he
watches Hanna refuse to defend herself against the charges,
Michael gradually realizes that she may be guarding a secret
more shameful than murder." Yes, more shameful than murder!
Lack of reading skills is more disgraceful than listening in
bovine silence to the screams of 300 people as they are burned to
death behind the locked doors of a church you're guarding to
prevent them from escaping the flames. Which is what Hanna
did, although, of course, it's not shown in the film. As I learned
from the director at a screening of The Reader, the scene was
omitted because it might have "unbalanced" our view of Hanna,
given too much weight to the mass murder she committed, as
opposed to her lack of reading skills. Made it more difficult to
develop empathy for her, although it's never explained why it's
important that we should.
And so the film never really questions the presumption that
nobody could know and thus register moral witness against mass
murder while it was going on. Who could have imagined it?
That's the metaphoric thrust of the Kate Winslet character's
"illiteracy": She's a stand-in for the German people and their
supposed inability to "read" the signs that mass murder was
being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one
can only say: What a crock! Or if Hollywood has its way: Here's
your Oscar.
Hard to believe, but it's almost unfair to say it's the fault of
ignorant West Coast types. I witnessed a shocking moment of
this sort of deferential ignorance in an audience of supposedly
sophisticated New Yorkers, many of them Jewish.
It was a relatively small early screening for "opinion-makers,"
hosted by a high-profile public-relations person. Harvey
Weinstein, a producer of the film, stopped by to wave at the
well-connected crowd (don't ask me why I was invited, probably
because I wrote Explaining Hitler) before catching a flight to
London, we were told.
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There was already some inside-Hollywood controversy over the
film since Weinstein's co-producer Scott Rudin had his name
removed from it—officially because of a dispute over the release
date and whether the film was "ready," although once I saw it, I
wondered whether there was more to it than that.
The word was this screening was part of a multipronged
Weinstein Oscar offensive on behalf of poor Oscar-less Kate
Winslet, who was up for nomination for two pictures,
Revolutionary Road (a non-Weinstein production) and The
Reader.
Which was why I got an angry call from the publicist the next
morning after the scene I (indirectly) caused at a Q&A with the
director, Stephen Daldry, held after the screening. Since my
girlfriend was out of town, I brought a friend who turned out to
be both outraged and outspoken about the film (and he wasn't
even Jewish).
Most of the questions to the British director were polite and
deferential to the point of insipidness. After all, he was a British
director and the screenplay was by a famous British playwright,
David Hare. Still, there was one question that turned up
something interesting that few reviewers seemed to have
noticed.
Daldry said he'd had a big fight with the author of The Reader,
Bernhard Schlink. In the novel, when Kate's mass murderer
learns to read, one of the things she reads about is—guess
what?—the Holocaust. We're led to believe that she's learning
about it, or at least the extent of it, for the first time, from
reading Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Hannah Arendt, and is
suitably horrified. You get the idea: Reading can develop a
moral sense, a path toward redemption. (This candy-coated
moral is probably what attracted Oprah when she selected The
Reader for her book club and made the otherwise obscure
German novel an American best-seller a decade ago.)
But Daldry said he and Hare eliminated the Holocaust education
aspect of the novel (over the strong objections of Schlink)
because he didn't want the film to seem to be about redemption;
too many Holocaust films offer a kind of false redemptiveness,
he said.
Well, good for him, but without that, he's made a film in which
all the techniques of Hollywood are used to evoke empathy for
an unrepentant mass murderer of Jews. The elimination of the
Primo Levi reading list in the novel—however meretricious a
gambit it is—deprives the literacy she achieves of any
relationship to the Holocaust, which eliminates the fraudulent
moral redemptiveness but also makes the film incoherent as a
response to the Holocaust. Why should we care that she can read
Chekhov's "Lady With Lapdog"?
Meanwhile, I could tell my friend was fuming. I was in a kind of
state of numbed disbelief and rarely like to attract attention to
myself by asking questions in forums such as these. My friend
had no such qualms. He was outraged by the film, not just by its
exculpatory thrust but by the way it achieved its end of evoking
empathy for Kate Winslet with what he called "manipulative"
nudity. (If you haven't seen the film, the first half-hour is
devoted to Kate—in the postwar years before her arrest—
seducing a teenage boy, whom she persuades to read to her
before sex. There's a lot more sex than reading and a fairly
shocking amount of nude close-ups of Kate's body. The teenager
later becomes a law student who watches her eventual
prosecution and helps her learn to read in prison. Literacy is
sexy! Or something.)
The nudity, which I've had cause to reference before in a column
on the irresistible (to culture-makers) attraction between Nazis
and sex, gives new meaning to the word gratuitous. To my
friend, it was a manipulative tool used to create intimacy with
and thus empathy for an unrepentant mass murderer. And what's
more—to shocked gasps, he said exactly that to the director in
the Q&A session. And didn't stop there, calling The Reader a
"dishonest and mediocre" film that used nudity to disguise its
thematic nakedness.
There was consternation in the room, especially among the
publicists, whose minions made sure to take our names after the
screening. This resulted in a high-decibel call to me the next
morning from the chief publicist, telling me she'd gotten "50
calls" from people at the screening saying how "rude" my
outspoken friend was, upbraiding me for bringing an impolite
interloper into the screening, telling me how important it was to
"the industry" that films like this succeed in the hard times we
were going through, and accusing me of everything but putting a
horse's head in Harvey Weinstein's bed.
"You mean you're saying I could be the death of Hollywood?" I
said, incredulously unaware of my secret superpowers. I tried to
explain to her my view: that it wasn't me or my friend who was
the problem, it was the movie. (She later called back somewhat
contritely.)
In any case, I had thought that those voting for Oscar
nominations would see the problems in this incoherent,
exculpatory film. But I was wrong. Kate got her Oscar
nomination for Harvey's film, not the other one. The Reader got
one, too.
Please, Hollywood, don't compound the error by giving the
Oscar to The Reader.
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Gregg Walks on Big Money Talks
By Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
Gregg specifically cited the stimulus package and the White
House's desire to have more authority over the census. But the
outline of the stimulus package has been known for weeks, and
when he was asked about the census issue, Gregg said that it
"was so insignificant that he would not even address it," notes
the WSJ. In the past few days, there was an intensifying effort by
Republicans to convince Gregg that he wouldn't be happy in the
administration, and White House officials believe this is what
led him to change his mind.
Geithner to the Rescue
A summary of what's in the major publications.
today's papers
Obama Loses Third Cabinet Nominee
By Daniel Politi
President Obama appears to have fallen into a pattern: Every
victory is followed by a setback. The New York Times,
Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide
newsbox lead with Republican Sen. Judd Gregg withdrawing as
the nominee for commerce secretary. Gregg said he "made a
mistake" accepting the nomination because he had "irresolvable
conflicts" with the administration, specifically citing the
stimulus package and the handling of the census. The White
House was surprised by the decision that made Gregg the third
prospective Cabinet secretary to bow out from consideration.
The Post notes that "nearly half a dozen" of the White House's
top apointees have had to withdraw or faced "embarrassing
scrutiny" in the past few weeks. "Since the president took office
last month, not a week has passed without the White House
responding to a personnel crisis," notes the NYT.
USA Today leads with word that five states are considering laws
that would restrict an employer's ability to use credit checks as
part of the hiring process. With unemployment rising, some state
lawmakers are saying that otherwise trustworthy people are
being prevented from getting jobs. "It's almost like being forever
sentenced to debtors' prison," said Hawaii state Rep. Marcus
Oshiro. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how the
stimulus package would pour about $26 billion into California. It
won't be enough to solve all of the state's money woes, but
officials say it will help the close the gap a bit. "California
cannot do without this bill," one state lawmaker said.
Gregg would have been the third Republican in Obama's
Cabinet, but yesterday he said he came to realize that he hadn't
thought through the consequences of what it would mean to be
part of an administration with which he has many disagreements.
He made his announcement in what the WSJ characterizes as a
"dramatic fashion" by sending out an e-mail to reporters
moments before Obama was set to take the stage in Peoria, Ill.
Obama was clearly not happy with the announcement and said it
was all rather strange considering that Gregg was the one who
approached the administration with interest in the job (an
allegation that Gregg denies). The Post says that White House
aides think it's clear "Obama has not been rewarded for reaching
across the aisle" and that he feels no obligation to now replace
Gregg with another Republican. After two failed nominees, it's
unclear who would be able to step in to take the post at
Commerce, and the White House says it has no leading
contenders.
The NYT, LAT, and USAT manage to include front-page pictures
of the late-night crash of a commuter plane in upstate New York.
A Continental flight from Newark crashed into a house five
miles from the Buffalo airport at around 10:20 p.m. All 48
people aboard and one person on the ground were killed.
A day after congressional leaders announced a deal had been
reached on the massive stimulus package, the bill was still being
changed. The NYT notes that at certain points yesterday, officials
were still unsure about what exactly was in the bill, which was
"a bit discomfiting for House Democrats, who had promised at
least 48 hours of public review before a vote." The final bill was
released late last night. One of the late additions to the bill was a
huge tax break for General Motors. Lawmakers also included a
limit on pay and bonuses for executives of financial companies
that accept taxpayer money from the Treasury and made the
provision retroactive. The House is expected to vote this
afternoon.
The LAT notes in a front-page piece that about $106 billion of
the stimulus package would be destined for education. That
amount is less than the House had hoped for but more than was
in the Senate version of the bill, and the money would pay for
special education, school construction, and retaining teachers,
among other things. The WP points out that the bill "would make
a significant down payment on Obama's health-care and energy
agendas" by providing almost $20 billion for medical records
and more than $40 billion for energy-efficiency programs.
In a front-page piece, the WSJ says that getting the bill approved
might be easier than actually spending the money. Many offices
in the federal government would get a huge influx of cash, and
they'll have to go through a dramatic overhaul in the way they do
business if they hope to release the money quickly. For example,
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one "obscure" office in the Commerce Department that has a $19
million budget and fewer than 20 grant officers would suddenly
be in charge of deciding who gets $7 billion in grants to expand
Internet access. There's probably no place where the challenges
are more apparent than at the Department of Energy, which has a
$25 billion budget and a record of delays and cost overruns.
The Post points out that, despite Obama's promises, the final bill
includes some pet projects that favor specific interest groups or
communities. Democrats insist that none of the provisions are
what are traditionally known as earmarks, but Republicans say
that whatever you call them, they are still wasteful and do little
to prop up the economy. For example, the bill includes $200
million for long-awaited compensation for Filipino veterans who
served in World War II.
All the papers go inside with the new intelligence chief warning
lawmakers that the economic crisis, not terrorism, is the most
urgent threat currently facing the United States. In his first
appearance before Congress as director of national intelligence,
Dennis Blair said the worldwide economic slowdown could lead
to political instability and spark new flows of refugees. In
addition, economic troubles could prevent "allies and friends"
from meeting "their defense and humanitarian obligations." The
Post notes this was "the first annual threat assessment in six
years in which terrorism was not presented as the primary
danger."
The NYT off-leads a news analysis that looks into how a growing
number of economists and financial experts are saying that the
government needs to get more deeply involved if it has any hope
of thawing the frozen credit markets. These analysts say that a
number of the nation's largest banks are basically insolvent and
that the Treasury program outlined this week to get toxic assets
out of balance sheets through a private-public partnership won't
solve the problem. Instead, "the government needs to plunge in,
weed out the weakest banks, pour capital into the surviving
banks and sell off the bad assets," explains the NYT. Indeed,
these experts claim that the government may have to end up
taking the bad assets itself if it hopes to end the credit crisis. It
could then hold on to these assets and sell them off when the
economy improves.
In its business section, the NYT has a dispatch from Tokyo that
says many experts who lived through Japan's "lost decade" say
they're surprised the United States isn't moving more
aggressively to tackle the economic crisis. "I thought America
had studied Japan's failures," a top official during the crisis said.
"Why is it making the same mistakes?" Japan tried many of the
same tactics that have so far been put forward in the United
States, but nothing worked until the government decided to
buckle down and take aggressive action, effectively
nationalizing a major bank and allowing others to fail. "The
lesson from Japan in the 1990s was that they should have
stepped up and nationalized the banks," one economist said.
The NYT's Paul Krugman says that so far the "administration's
response to the economic crisis is all too reminiscent of Japan in
the 1990s." Most economists agree the stimulus package isn't big
enough, particularly considering that the Treasury still hasn't
outlined a plan that could actually work to resolve the financial
crisis. Krugman says he's "got a sick feeling … that America just
isn't rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years." If
Obama isn't "stronger looking forward," writes Krugman, "the
verdict on this crisis might be that no, we can't."
In the NYT's op-ed page, E.J. Levy points out that "insects and
mold in our food are not new," and the Food and Drug
Administration actually approves, as long as it's within a certain
amount. Tomato juice, for example, can average "10 or more fly
eggs per 100 grams." When all is said and done, "you're
probably ingesting one to two pounds of flies, maggots and
mites each year without knowing it."
today's papers
Congress Makes a Deal
By Daniel Politi
Well, that was quick. After a day of rapid-fire negotiations,
House and Senate leaders announced last night that they had
reached a deal on a $789.5 billion stimulus package that would,
among other things, pay for billions in new construction and
infrastructure projects, provide tax relief to individuals and
businesses, and extend unemployment benefits. Democrats say it
will save or create 3.5 million new jobs, a decline from the 4
million they had originally said was the goal. "The deal all but
clinches passage of one of the largest economic rescue programs
since Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal," notes the
Wall Street Journal. The New York Times says that a House vote
could come as early as Friday, and the Senate would quickly
follow so the president can sign it on Monday. There's talk that
President Obama might hold a televised prime-time bill signing
ceremony. The Los Angeles Times says the negotiations were
able to move quickly partly due to "to the presence of a team
from the White House, which injected itself deeply in the
process." After all the partisan fighting, it might be surprising to
hear that the final deal "followed remarkably closely to the broad
outline that Obama had painted more than a month ago," points
out the Washington Post.
USA Today gives big play to the news from Congress but
devotes its lead spot to a new poll that suggests Americans don't
want the government to just focus on the economy and forget
about the past. Almost two-thirds of Americans say there should
be investigations into the Bush administration's warrantless
wiretapping program and whether torture was used to interrogate
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terrorism suspects. Almost 40 percent say they'd favor criminal
investigations. Americans also want the administration to
investigate whether the Bush administration used the Justice
Department for political purposes.
Just because the agreement on the stimulus package came
quickly doesn't mean it arrived "without moments of high
drama," as the LAT puts it. Everybody points out that at one
point in the day, Senate Democrats announced they had reached
a deal, but House members denied that was the case. That led to
a two-hour meeting in which it seems Democrats were able to
win some last-minute concessions.
Full details on the revised stimulus package weren't available
last night, but the papers, especially the WSJ, have lots of details.
In an inside story, the LAT handily outlines who will benefit
from the package. Approximately 35 percent of the bill's total
would go to tax cuts, and the rest would go to spending. The tax
relief for individuals was reduced, and the White House also
agreed to cut back on the proposed aid to financially strapped
state governments. In the end, $53.6 billion will go to a state
"stabilization fund," and most of that money will be for schools.
The money devoted to tax breaks for home and car buyers was
also decreased. But the final agreement did keep the $70 billion
measure to prevent millions of Americans from having to pay
the Alternative Minimum Tax next year.
There was grumbling among some Democrats yesterday that
their side gave in too easily, but leaders said they had no choice
if they wanted to hold on to the three Republican votes in the
Senate. There was particular ire directed at the Alternative
Minimum Tax provision that they said would have been
approved by Congress regardless. "It's about 9 percent of the
whole bill," Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said. "Why is it in there?
It has nothing to do with stimulus. It has nothing to do with
recovery."
In a front-page analysis, the NYT says that while the agreement
represents "a quick, sweet victory" for the president, it "was
hardly a moment for cigars." Obama got his package, but
without the broad bipartisan support he was expecting. The
question now is whether Obama will be able to move on to other
items in his domestic agenda so that his first days in office aren't
defined solely by a stimulus package that, by his own admission,
may not work as quickly as many Americans might be
expecting.
In a front-page piece, USAT says that while it's clear that Obama
"had some stumbles" along the way, many are impressed by the
way "Obama and his team have shown a willingness to cut their
losses and revise their tactics." In the end, the fight over the
stimulus package may have taught the young administration
some valuable lessons about doing business in Washington that
could prove to be useful as the president continues to pursue his
agenda in the coming months.
The LAT, NYT, and WP front the deadly day in Afghanistan as
teams of Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen attacked three
government buildings, including the Justice Ministry and
Education Ministry, in Kabul, killing at least 20 people and
wounding more than 50. All eight attackers were also killed. It
was the worst violence in Afghanistan's capital since July, when
the Indian Embassy was destroyed, and appeared designed to be
a show of strength for the Taliban on the eve of a scheduled visit
by Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to the region. The
LAT notes that "Kabul's inner districts are a tangle of blast walls
and security checkpoints," but the attackers somehow managed
to get "into some of the city's most secure areas." Afghan
officials quickly pointed the finger at Pakistan, saying that the
attackers sent text messages to Pakistan before they entered the
Justice Ministry. The NYT has the most detail about the drama
and chaos that engulfed the Justice Ministry and says at least two
people were killed in the crossfire between government forces
and the gunmen.
The WP off-leads a look at how employers are increasingly
trying to block unemployment payments to former workers.
More than one-quarter of people applying for unemployment
benefits are being challenged by their former employers, and
numbers show the proportion of attempts to block the payouts
has "reached record levels in recent years." Employers save
money on their unemployment insurance when the claims are
dropped, so they've increasingly been trying to show that a
worker was fired for misconduct or left voluntarily, two factors
that makes someone ineligible to receive benefits. The increase
is particularly notable in challenges involving misconduct,
which employers lose "about two-thirds of the time."
The LAT goes inside with a look at how the White House has
made it pretty clear that it believes Iran is pursuing a nuclear
bomb. Although officials say that while there isn't new evidence
to contradict the National Intelligence Estimate of November
2007, which concluded Iran had stopped working on a nuclear
weapon, there's a "growing consensus that it provided a
misleading picture and that the country was poised to reach
crucial bomb-making milestones this year."
The WSJ notes that a clinic in Los Angeles has announced that it
will soon be able to help those seeking a form of fertility
treatment select the gender and certain physical traits of their
baby. It's not clear whether the clinic can actually do that just
yet, but it demonstrates that the huge growth of a procedure used
to prevent life-threatening diseases "has accelerated genetic
knowledge swiftly enough that pre-selecting cosmetic traits in a
baby is no longer the stuff of science fiction." Using the
procedure to select a baby's sex is forbidden in many countries,
but not in the United States.
The NYT tells the horrifying story of a man who was hit by a car
in New York. The driver called the police but then didn't see a
body so he assumed he made a mistake. But it turns out that the
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driver of a van that passed through that spot moments later didn't
see the body and ended up dragging the man "through major
arteries of Queens and Brooklyn" for 50 minutes. It's unclear
whether the man died when he was first hit.
While many industries are suffering, businesses offering
matchmaking services are seeing a huge boom. Online sites are
seeing more business, as are traditional matchmaking services
that set up members or offer them classes on how to meet the
right person. Match.com, for example, had its strongest fourth
quarter of the last seven years. Those in the online dating
industry say that not only are there more people with free time,
but it's also much cheaper to join a dating site than to meet a
potential partner through traditional means. And experts say it's
natural for people to seek companionship during hard times.
The recession has also done little to stop suspicious men and
women from spending money to find out whether their spouse is
cheating, reports USAT. The sale of tracking devices and hiring
of private investigators always increases around Valentine's Day
because it's seen as a perfect time to discover whether a spouse
is hiding something. While the economy may have put a dent on
people's abilities to hire a private detective, they're still snapping
up tracking software. The head of a company that sells spyware
to track spouses says he was surprised when sales shot up in the
past month because he expected that couples would stay home
more during a recession. "Apparently," he said, "money troubles
don't stop the philandering."
today's papers
Geithner Bombs Coming-Out Party
By Daniel Politi
The much-anticipated announcement turned out to be a big
letdown. The New York Times highlights that the
administration's plan to rescue the nation's financial system that
was unveiled by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "is far
bigger than anyone predicted and envisions a far greater
government role in markets and banks than at any time since the
1930s." The administration said it's committed to spending as
much as $2.5 trillion in the effort. But Wall Street quickly gave
the plan "a resounding thumbs down," as USA Today puts it,
because it was short on some very key details that made clear the
plan is very much a work in progress. The Wall Street Journal
points out that the markets experienced the worst sell-off since
President Obama moved into the White House as stocks plunged
nearly 5 percent sending the market "to its lowest level since
Nov. 20."
Investors weren't alone in their unhappiness with the plan.
Lawmakers were also quick to criticize Geithner for failing to
provide more details on how the administration plans to deal
with the ongoing mess. "What they did is over-promise and
under-deliver," the head of a private investment firm tells the
Washington Post. "They said there was going to be a plan, so
everybody expected a plan. And there was nothing." The Los
Angeles Times says that the lack of details in the announcement
"reflects a double bind for the Obama administration." It's
become clear that the problems in the financial system are bigger
than expected and could require more money to fix, but at the
same time Congress has grown even angrier at Wall Street,
which makes it highly unlikely that lawmakers would approve
more funding for the effort.
Most of what was announced by Geithner yesterday was already
known. He outlined a multipronged approach to fix the financial
system that included a private-public partnership to get bad
assets out of banks' balance sheets, a new round of direct cash
injections into ailing banks, and an expansion of a Federal
Reserve program to increase consumer and business lending.
The NYT points out that the administration "would stretch" the
remaining money in the bailout plan "by relying on the Federal
Reserve's ability to create money, in effect, out of thin air."
Investors were particularly curious to hear how the
administration intends to implement the plan of joining public
and private money to buy toxic assets—the NYT is alone in
calling it a "bad bank"—but all Geithner could say is that the
administration is "exploring a range of different options."
Investors are still finding it difficult to understand how this
private-public cooperation would succeed in setting a price for
the bad assets that would be agreeable to both buyers and sellers
without a huge government subsidy. The administration was also
able to provide only the most basic outline of the review that is
planned of the largest banks to determine how much trouble
they're in and how much help they need. This "stress test" is
supposed to help the government "shed light, for the first time,
on the true extent of the toxic asset problem," notes the WP.
White House officials insisted the lack of details in the plan was
intentional because they want to make sure everyone has time to
give their views before the plan is fully formed. The previous
administration was highly criticized for haphazardly changing
plans in midstream without consulting Congress, and that's
exactly what the Obama team wants to avoid. The WSJ has some
interesting insight into why the administration might be taking
so long to settle on a final plan. By deciding early on that they
wouldn't consult heavily with former Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson's team, administration officials ended up spending
weeks trying to figure out some of the same issues that had
confounded their predecessors. White House officials also were
reluctant to consult Wall Street so it wouldn't look like it was a
plan developed by the industry. Bank executives hope they'll get
more of an input now that Geithner has made his announcement.
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Geithner harshly criticized the previous administration's
approach to the crisis yesterday. But in outlining his proposal
"Geithner seemed to be following the Hank Paulson playbook,"
says the WP in an analysis piece. The few items in Geithner's
plan that were new "came with so few details about how they
would work that it contributed to the very public anxiety and
investor uncertainty that Geithner criticized," notes the Post. The
paper points out that the parts of the plan that had the most detail
"are direct continuations of rescue efforts undertaken by
Paulson." It's therefore no surprise that Sen. Richard Shelby, the
senior Republican on the Senate banking committee, said the
proposal outlined by Geithner looked like "son of Paulson."
In a front-page column, the LAT's Michael Hiltzik says that
Geithner, "perhaps unwittingly," made it clear that the new
administration is finding it difficult to find answers to the same
"issues that confounded their Republican predecessors in
fashioning a bank bailout." But Hiltzik thinks we should cut
Geithner some slack because "a financial bailout can't take place
on CNBC time." The WP's Steven Pearlstein warns that the
criticism from Wall Street shouldn't be taken too seriously
because traders and executives won't be happy until the
government agrees to pick up the tab for all their mistakes "so
they can once again earn inflated profits and obscene pay
packages by screwing over their customers and their
shareholders."
While Geithner was short on details, over on Capitol Hill it's all
about the details. As expected, the Senate approved the massive
stimulus package yesterday, so now congressional negotiators
must begin their high-stakes discussions to come up with a
compromise bill that they hope to get to the president by the end
of the week. The White House wants to restore some of the
spending that was cut out of the Senate bill, but it's a risky
proposition because it could mean losing the support of
moderate Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. Negotiators
are aiming to bring the cost of the final package down to $800
billion. The three Senate Republicans who supported the bill,
along with some Democrats, said they're ready to vote against
the stimulus if House Democrats manage to add more spending
to the package.
Almost all the papers front the mass confusion in Israel that
resulted after voters went to the polls and failed to give anyone a
clear edge. With almost all the votes counted, the centrist
Kadima Party, led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni,
unexpectedly won the largest share of parliament with 28 seats.
But Kadima appeared to win only one more seat than the more
conservative Likud Party, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, and the
parliament as a whole experienced a sharp rightward shift. Now
it's unclear who will be the next prime minister, and both
Netanyahu and Livni claimed victory. The leader of the party
that gets the most votes is usually given the first chance to create
a coalition government, but that might prove to be an impossible
task for Livni given that the right-wing bloc appears to have won
many more seats. The negotiations could take weeks.
Regardless of whether Livni or Netanyahu gets the prime
minister job, Obama's desire to start working on a peace process
between Israel and Palestinians "suffered a significant setback
yesterday," notes the Post in an analysis piece inside. The
parliament's significant rightward shift means that even if Livni,
who has spoken up in favor of negotiating with Palestinians,
manages to form a government, it's likely that she "will be
hamstrung by her coalition partners." The Post points out that
the division in Israel "mirrors the split within the Palestinian
government" between Hamas and Fatah on whether to pursue
negotiations and work toward a peace plan. The divisions in both
societies are so great "that few believe either the Israelis or the
Palestinians can muster the will to reach a deal."
The WP's Kathleen Parker says that the first days of Obama's
presidency "have been a study in amateurism." The new
administration is lacking maturity, and Obama still "wants too
much to be liked" when that is often the price of being president.
"Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice." It's
beginning to show that "the young senator from Illinois became
a president overnight, before he had time to gain the confidence
and wisdom one earns through trials and errors."
Not so fast, says the WP's Ruth Marcus, who writes that the first
few days of the administration are "actually going rather well."
Sure, there have been problems, but expecting that a new
administration would be able to put together such a massive
stimulus package without any problems "is like expecting a firstyear med student to perform surgery—before the stethoscopes
have been handed out." And it's clear that Obama has achieved
more in his first few days than either of his two predecessors.
"So if you're feeling jittery about Obama's start, ask yourself
this," writes Marcus. "Is there another president in recent
memory who would have done better?"
today's papers
Obama Gets Tough on Republicans
By Daniel Politi
The New York Times and USA Today lead with, and everyone
else fronts, President Obama's efforts to sell his massive
stimulus package directly to the American people with a townhall-style meeting in Elkhart, Ind., and his first prime-time news
conference held in the East Room of the White House. Stating
that the country faces a "profound economic emergency,"
Obama warned that failing to do anything "could turn a crisis
into a catastrophe." The president acknowledged that the "plan is
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not perfect," but he pushed Congress to come to an agreement
quickly. "We've had a good debate," Obama said. "Now it's time
to act."
The Washington Post leads with new details on the
administration's plan to rescue the financial industry that
officials estimate could commit up to $1.5 trillion in public and
private funds. (The WSJ says $2 trillion.) For now, the
administration has no plans to ask for more than the $350 billion
that is left over from the original package. The Los Angeles
Times leads locally with the tentative ruling issued by a panel of
three federal judges that says California must reduce its state
prison population by as much as one-third, or about 57,000
people. The judges said the state prisons are so overcrowded—
they were designed for 84,000 inmates but currently hold
158,000—that inmates can't receive the level of health care to
which they are entitled under the Constitution.
Obama's hourlong news conference came a few hours after the
Senate voted 61-36 to cut off debate on the stimulus package. A
final vote is expected today, which will send the bill into
negotiations between the House and the Senate to reconcile their
different versions of the measure. The NYT notes that the news
conference "was the centerpiece" of an intense effort by the
administration "to wrest control of the stimulus debate from
Republicans and reframe it on Mr. Obama's terms." But even as
he tried to launch a new offensive, "Obama sounded less like a
political gladiator fighting for his first big initiative than a
schoolteacher trying to calm overwrought children," declares the
LAT.
In a news analysis inside, the NYT says that Obama made it clear
"that he had all but given up hope of securing a bipartisan
consensus" on the stimulus package, emphasizing that it is far
more important to pass the measure quickly. He wasn't shy about
taking on Republican critics of the bill, saying that the GOP
doesn't "have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal
responsibility." In its own analysis, the LAT points out that
Obama is trying to "shape the public view" of Republicans.
Several times yesterday, Obama "painted his GOP adversaries as
well beyond the mainstream" and he not-so-subtly suggested that
his opponents just want to watch the economy decline without
doing anything.
While the economy was the dominant issue in the news
conference, the president also touched on other topics but didn't
really make any news. He said he was "looking at areas where
we can have constructive dialogue" with Iran and criticized
Afghanistan's government, declaring that it "seems very
detached from what's going on." He was also asked about the
next phase in the bailout plan to help ailing financial institutions,
but he refused to give any details and said he was not able to
estimate quite yet how much money it would take to thaw the
frozen credit markets. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is
scheduled to outline today how the administration plans to use
the second installment of the $700 billion bailout package.
The general outline of the new phase in the rescue program had
already been reported, but the papers have some new interesting
details today. The Treasury will offer low-cost financing to
entice investors into purchasing the toxic assets held by banks
and hopes to accomplish this by initially raising $250 billion to
$500 billion in public and private funds. Before the
administration decides which banks will receive another
injection of cash, it will carry out "stress tests" to figure out how
much money the financial firms need and, according to the WP,
"whether these firms could withstand a downturn even worse
than the current one." Surprisingly, Geithner won't mention any
plans to help distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure. Officials
said that plan is still in the works and could be unveiled next
week but it's expected to be a $50 billion initiative, which is at
the low end of what everyone was expecting. The WSJ reports
that the administration is retiring TP's favorite acronym of the
day, TARP, since it will be renaming the Troubled Asset Relief
Program as the Financial Stability Plan.
The WSJ notes that the first attempts to sell the plan to Congress
"got off to a rocky start" in briefings with House and Senate
staffers because of the lack of detail provided. There seems to be
a general feeling that the highly anticipated outline of the plan
will turn out to be underwhelming because the whole thing is
still very much a work in progress. Indeed, the NYT says that
becuase of internal debates within the administration "some of
the most contentious issues remain unresolved."
The NYT details that Geithner's fingerprints are all over the new
bailout plan. Many administration officials, including some of
Obama's top aides, wanted to impose more stringent conditions
on the financial institutions that would get help, but Geithner
resisted and "largely prevailed." While the plan will require that
all banks submit detailed plans on how they intend to use the
government money to improve their lending programs, Geithner
was adamant that the plan might not work if the government
tries to get too involved in running the financial companies. In
the end, "the plan largely repeats the Bush administration's
approach of deferring to many of the same companies and
executives who had peddled risky loans and investments at the
heart of the crisis," declares the NYT.
Everyone reports that the Obama administration appeared to
surprise federal appeals judges yesterday when it invoked the
same "state secrets" privilege that the Bush administration used.
The case involves five men who say they were abducted by U.S.
operatives and taken to countries where they were tortured. They
are suing a Boeing subsidiary for allegedly providing the aircraft
that the CIA used in its "extraordinary rendition" program.
Yesterday, Justice Department lawyers said the case shouldn't be
allowed to proceed because state secrets and national security
interests could be threatened if the issue is discussed in court.
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"This is not change," ACLU's executive director said. "This is
definitely more of the same."
USAT goes across its front page with, and the NYT off-leads,
baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez admitting that he used
performance-enhancing drugs from 2001-03. "I was young. I
was stupid. I was naive," said the 33-year-old, who is the
highest-paid player in baseball. The WSJ provides a stark
example of how much the paper has changed since it was
purchased by News Corp. by placing a huge picture of
Rodriguez on its front page.
The LAT points out that one of the few moments of levity in
Obama's news conference came when he turned his vice
president "into a punch line." When asked what Joe Biden meant
when he said there was still a "30 percent chance we're going to
get it wrong," Obama said he didn't "remember exactly what Joe
was referring to." And then added: "Not surprisingly." Although
the two men seem fond of each other, this was the latest episode
that suggests "the mutual admiration may have its limits," notes
the LAT.
The WSJ reports that Bob Marley's family has joined forces with
a private equity firm to make a major push to license anything
that uses the Reggae singer's likeness or name. Marley died in
1981, but his name is still a huge draw and companies that use it
without permission produce an estimated $600 million in annual
sales. The House of Marley wants to go after these counterfeiters
and grow the brand into a $1 billion retail business within the
next few years. So what can we expect? First, there will be
Marley Lager, a Jamaican beer, and Marley Coffee, which will
come from an organic coffee plantation in Jamaica. But pretty
soon they hope to add headphones, snowboards, posters, and
screensavers, among other items. "The Marleys stand for
something," the chief executive of Hilco Consumer capital said,
"peace and love."
today's papers
Obama Wants Bailout To Go Private
By Daniel Politi
The Washington Post leads with news that the White House has
delayed its announcement of the new plan to bail out ailing
financial firms in order to keep all eyes focused on the massive
stimulus package. The Senate will hold a procedural vote today
to determine whether the compromise $827 billion measure will
receive enough Republican support to move forward. If it is
approved, the Senate will have to spend the week negotiating
with the House to reconcile their versions of the bill. The New
York Times and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox
lead with details on what the new bailout plan will look like. It
seems the White House wants private investors to play a big part
in helping banks get the bad assets out of their balance sheets.
USA Today leads with a look at how the effort to rebuild the
Gulf Coast "remains largely stalled" more than three years after
hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the area. More than $3.9
billion of the $5.8 billion promised to help fix public works
remains unspent. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to look
once again at the issue to determine how the process can be
improved. The Los Angeles Times leads with the worst wildfires
in Australia's history, which have killed at least 130 people so
far. Arson is suspected in at least some of the fires, which have
destroyed more than 750 homes.
The NYT notes that the details of the new bailout plan for
financial institutions are still "sketchy" and probably will remain
that way even after the program is announced on Tuesday. Right
now it looks as if the program will have four parts. The Treasury
will inject more money into banks, institute new programs to
help homeowners avoid foreclosure, expand a Federal Reserve
program to thaw the consumer credit markets, and devise a
method to help banks get rid of bad assets. The NYT says that in
order to get the private sector involved, the government "would
guarantee a floor value" on the bad assets to push investors to
take up the risk. The WSJ says the plan will call for an
"aggregator bank," or "bad bank," to buy up the bad assets. The
government would put up some money, but the idea is that the
private sector would provide most of the financing.
By getting the private sector involved, the Obama administration
hopes to avoid having the government determine the price of the
bad assets and risk overpaying for them. And by taking away
some of the risk for investors, the White House hopes to restore
confidence in the banking system. The WSJ points out that some
sort of of incentive is essential to get the private sector to
participate in the bad bank, since investors can already buy some
toxic assets in the open market. While cautioning nothing has
been decided yet, the WSJ says it's likely that investors will buy
a stake in the bad bank, which would then go out to buy the bad
assets. But that assumes financial institutions will want to sell
their assets for the price that investors and the government
would be willing to pay. Some banks have proved reluctant to
sell and are holding onto their assets in the hope that they'll be
able to recoup some of their losses when the market recovers.
The new bailout plan has so many different unknowns that
Americans will soon realize that the massive stimulus plan was
the "easy part," notes an analysis piece inside the NYT. The
stimulus plan may involve a huge political fight, but the truth is
that the government is relying on a well-known formula to jumpstart the economy, while "the problems facing the financial
system have no real parallels in scale or complexity," writes
David Sanger. Lawmakers can easily explain the stimulus
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package to their constituents, but getting support to spend what
could amount to trillions of dollars to save the very institutions
that have "become symbols of excess and greed" will be much
more difficult. "We know what we need to do," a senior member
of Obama's economic team said. "But the perception is that you
are bailing out a bunch of Wall Street bankers, and even many
Democrats are going to rebel at that."
For now, the White House is keeping its focus on the stimulus
package, and Obama will launch a new effort to try to sell the
plan to the American people. He will spend today in Indiana
before holding his first prime-time news conference, where he
will urge lawmakers to work quickly on reconciling the House
and Senate versions of the bill. On Tuesday, Obama will fly to
Florida. As the fight drags on, public support for the package
appears to be decreasing, so White House advisers told the
president "he had no choice but to fire up Air Force One and
return to a mode of campaigning that helped him win the
presidency," notes the NYT.
Even though senators haven't voted yet, congressional aides have
started working on trying to figure out the main differences
between the House and Senate versions of the stimulus package.
It looks as if we're in for a long process, and Democratic aides
tell the WP that it might be difficult to get the legislation on the
president's desk by this weekend. The White House has tried to
minimize the differences between the two bills, but House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said some of the changes in the Senate
compromise are "very damaging." Democrats are holding out
hope that more Republicans will be willing to support the
measure. Three GOP senators have suggested that they would
back the compromise but have made no commitments to support
the bill that will come out of the negotiations between the House
and the Senate.
In a front-page piece, the WP points out that Republican leaders
are beginning to see opposition to the stimulus package as the
first step "in the party's liberation from an unpopular president."
Republicans say that they have been able to pull together, and it
won't matter if the bill ultimately passes because they've made
their point. "We're standing on our core principles, and the core
principle that suffered the most in recent years was fiscal
conservatism and economic liberty," Rep. Paul Ryan of
Wisconsin said. It's a risky strategy that has so far successfully
given the appearance of unity, when, in fact, Republicans are
divided on how they should regroup. Many think that as long as
Republicans stick to the principles of small government, much
of their base will come back. But others say that's a misreading
of the electorate, and the party has to develop new ideas if it
hopes to regain power.
The WP talked to contracting specialists who warn that the
stimulus plan may end up wasting billions of dollars if the
government tries to spend the money too quickly. Although the
bill does contain measures to ensure oversight, many say it
would be nearly impossible to do so effectively, considering that
contracting officials "would be asked to spend more money more
rapidly than ever before."
The NYT takes a look at Avigdor Lieberman, a candidate in
Tuesday's Israeli parliamentary elections who wants all Arab
citizens to sign a loyalty oath. He wants all citizens to vow
allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state and to commit to military
service. It's highly unlikely that Lieberman will be the next
prime minister, but his Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Is Our Home)
party will probably come in third and become a key power
broker. Unlike others who have espoused similar views,
Lieberman isn't religious and has been able to get lots of support
by not adhering to a traditional right-wing agenda while
characterizing the Arab Israeli population as a threat.
The WP's Jackson Diehl writes that "for the first time in decades,
Israelis may choose a prime minister who is promising to wage
war." Binyamin Netanyahu is slightly ahead in the polls and has
vowed to topple Hamas if he is in power, while Foreign Minister
Tzipi Livni, who is in second place, is promising to continue
peace talks. At a time when the Obama administration is trying
to increase diplomacy in the Middle East, "it may find itself with
an Israeli partner that rejects negotiations with its neighbors and
does its best to push the United States toward military
confrontation with Iran and its proxies."
today's papers
"Put This Plan in Motion"
By Lydia DePillis
Sunday, February 8, 2009, at 6:04 AM ET
The New York Times leads with continuing stimulus debate in
Congress, where the Senate proposal is set to collide with a
House bill that currently does more to help states avoid
catastrophic cuts in services. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is
"very much opposed" to the cuts being made to the Senate
version, which was trimmed down from a high of $900 billion to
about $827 billion through slashing aid to states, funding for
priorities like school construction and broadband wireless in
rural areas, as well as President Barack Obama's promised
middle-class tax cut.
The Los Angeles Times leads with the impact of those cuts in aid
to states, which are facing a collective $47.4 billion shortfall this
year and $84.3 billion in 2010. On a state-by-state basis, the
gaps are often breathtaking in size: Nevada's amounts to 38
percent of its general fund, while Washington's governor made a
no-new-taxes pledge in her tough re-election campaign, leaving
few options to fill that state's hole besides closing state parks,
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releasing low-risk prisoners, and "shredding" the state's generous
social services programs.
Holbrooke answers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose
foreign policy views he helped shape.
The Washington Post leads with news that the National Security
Council will get some real say-so in this administration, as NSC
adviser James L. Jones promises a forthright approach enabled
by direct access to the president—a shift from the Bush practice
of consulting and making decisions with a backroom inner
circle.
The LAT's feature lead is the first in a three-part might-as-wellbe-made-for-TV series on an American priest who died fighting
corruption in Kenya. The paper also sets up Rush Limbaugh as
the GOP's shadow leader-in-exile, tracing his influence as
someone who only gains strength among the people from those
who oppose him on high. The Post's Tom Ricks focuses in on
Army Gen. Raymond Odierno's role in devising and
orchestrating the "surge" of troops in Iraq, which had previously
been attributed to White House aides. When he started
advocating for the troop increase, top brass disagreed, and
Odierno only got his way by going straight to Defense Secretary
Robert Gates.
President Obama threw his weight behind the Senate stimulus
proposal, urging lawmakers in his weekly radio address to
swallow hard and pass the thing already (he's also got a secret
weapon in Michelle, who has become unexpectedly active in
promoting her husband's policy agenda). "Economists agree,"
the Post proclaims, after polling number-crunchers from all
points on the political spectrum, with the general consensus that
whatever the stimulus ends up looking like, it should come soon.
The adjoining feature looks at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's
plans for the second half of the economic rescue plan, which
promises to satisfy advocates of decisive action: The new guy
favors "aggressive use of all available tools," according to the
paper's analysis of his monetary philosophy, and is expected to
announce a plan tomorrow or Tuesday aimed at getting banks
lending fast.
If that's the supply side of the economic crisis, the NYT also
covers the demand side, with a long biopsy of a community in
exurban Florida reshaped by the housing boom and devastated
by its bust, to the point where families are struggling with the
cost of food.
Way back in the business pages, the NYT has a more detailed
analysis of the administration's tax plans, including a
"refundable tax credit" for those earning too little to even pay
income taxes. Overall, the paper says, the changes closely
resemble those Obama put forth a year ago on the campaign
trail. While you're there, read the riveting tale of pride brought
low in Bank of America's messy takeover of Merrill Lynch, in
which Merrill's ex-CEO John Thain tried to take a $40 million
bonus in a quarter when the firm lost $15.3 billion. The deal is
now limping along without him, as the bank sucks up more
taxpayer money to save itself from going under.
It's also Great Men Day at the papers, which front several
profiles of note. Hamid Karzai's American honeymoon is long
since over, the NYT writes, as the Afghan leader faces an uphill
campaign for re-election this summer. President Obama has
labeled him ineffective and unreliable, and State Department
officials are beginning to work around him directly with
provincial rulers. Also on A1, the NYT features Richard
Holbrooke, veteran of the Dayton peace accords and newly
appointed special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Called by
one source the "diplomatic equivalent of a hydrogen bomb,"
If the newspapers are correct, it appears that Charles Darwin and
Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, at least
approximately: Both will be celebrated this Thursday. In the
NYT's Book Review, William Safire helps sift through the latest
spate of Lincoln bios, now coming hot and heavy on the 200th
anniversary of his birth. The Darwin bicentennial has also
occasioned a re-examination of his work. In his time, most
believed that evolution slowed down as humans neared
perfection—but according to the LAT, the pace of evolution has
actually sped up as time marches on.
Taking stock of Iraq nearly six years after the U.S. invasions, the
NYT's Week in Review reminds us that peaceful elections in Iraq
don't necessarily mean a sustainable peace or a stronger position
for the United States in the neighborhood. And laying out the
foreign policy game plan for the next four years, Vice President
Joe Biden made a speech at a security conference in Munich
yesterday that began to set up a delicate framework for
engagement with Russia—emphasizing diplomacy over military
options but rejecting the notion of a Russian "sphere of
influence" that the United States must respect.
In the latest evidence that nothing is ever as it seems, and the
one smaller-than-thought man in a day of mensches, slugger
Alex Rodriguez has been outed for taking performanceenhancing drugs in 2003. O tempore!
today's papers
Senate Finally Gets Stimulated
By Joshua Kucera
Everyone leads with news of a compromise reached by Senate
Democrats and a few moderate Republicans on the stimulus bill,
which now appears to have enough support to pass the Senate.
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The compromise cut about $110 billion from the previous Senate
version of the bill, and the new bill weighs in at about $820
billion. The cuts included some of President Obama's signature
proposals, including the plans to computerize medical records
and expand broadband Internet to rural areas. A White House
aide told the Wall Street Journal that the compromise was "a
strategic retreat."
The cuts included $40 billion in aid to states, half of a proposed
$15 billion in "incentive grants" for states that meet certain goals
for their initial education allotment, and $5 billion from a plan to
help unemployed workers pay for health care coverage,
according to the Washington Post. And the New York Times
mentions "$20 billion proposed for school construction; $8
billion to refurbish federal buildings and make them more
energy efficient [and] $1 billion for the early childhood program
Head Start."
Most Republicans, though, remained unhappy with the bill
because it included spending for pet Democratic projects that
weren't focused on stimulating the economy. And House
Democrats weren't happy with it, either, for the opposite reason.
The Post quotes House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, DS.C., saying "I don't think much of what the Senate is doing."
The bill is expected to come up for a vote on Monday.
Obama hits the road this weekend, traveling to Indiana and
Florida to try to drum up public support for the bill. Explains the
Los Angeles Times: "Obama's travels are 'a way of transferring
the legislation from a Pelosi-Reid face to an Obama face,' said
Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster. 'And the Obama face is a more
attractive one.' "
The LAT has an analysis of John McCain's role in the stimulus
negotiations, which are causing conflict between two of his
trademarks: bipartisanship and opposition to excessive spending.
So far, the latter is winning out and he led opposition to the
compromise bill. "One of the reasons why Republicans lost the
last election is because our base, who are concerned about our
stewardship of their tax dollars, believes we got on a spending
spree," he said.
The Post and NYT front news that the father of Pakistan's nuclear
program—who then sold nuclear weapons technology to North
Korea, Libya, and Iran—was freed yesterday from house arrest.
The NYT suggested the move was "intended to shore up support
for the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, which has been
derided in the Pakistani press as being too close to the United
States." Both papers note that the investigation into his
smuggling network has gone badly and that there is a danger that
his release could reactivate it. "It is possible, U.S. officials
concede, that Khan and his allies shared nuclear secrets with
still-unknown countries and, perhaps, terrorist groups, as well,"
the Post writes.
The NYT has a good front-page exclusive on a botched military
mission in Uganda that the United States supported and funded.
The mission, carried out by the Ugandan military, was intended
to "crush" the infamous Lord's Resistance Army, which had
been holed up in a village in neighboring Congo. But the
offensive failed and the LRA fanned out, committing massacres
that killed up to 900 civilians. Critics said the United States
should have known the operation would have ended in
massacres. American officials told the paper the United States
had 17 military officers advising the Ugandans and equipping
them with "satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel."
The assistance was approved personally by President Bush.
Lonely Planet: With all the news of decreasing violence in Iraq,
you might think it's ready for at least a few intrepid tourists. Not
so, says the NYT, which chronicles the adventures of a 33-yearold Italian who tried to visit Iraq on the cheap. He was detained
by Iraqi police after taking the bus to Fallujah—where he
became the "first western leisure visitor" to the city—and his trip
came to an end. Friday night he was being held by the police
"for his own protection," and the Italian Embassy arranged a
flight for him to leave early this morning.
tv club
Friday Night Lights, Season 3
Week 4: Dillon's McMansion district located!
The economic news was worse earlier in the day, when new job
numbers came out and showed that the unemployment rate was
7.6 percent and that nearly 600,000 jobs were lost in January.
"The recession has deepened and we're in the worst part of it
now, following the financial crisis and before government action
can have an effect," one economist told the LAT.
By Emily Bazelon, Meghan O'Rourke, and Hanna Rosin
Even the prospect of a stimulus bill passing sent stocks up. The
Dow Jones rose 2.7 percent and infrastructure-related companies
did especially well, the WSJ noted: Caterpillar rose 5.3 percent.
U.S. Steel rose 10 percent and steel-and-grain shipper Genco
Shipping & Trading added 8.7 percent.
Posted Saturday, January 17, 2009, at 7:01 AM ET
From: Hanna Rosin
To: Emily Bazelon and Meghan O'Rourke
Subject: Week 1: Mass Amnesia Strikes Dillon, Texas
As anyone who has talked or e-mailed with me in the last couple
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of months knows, my obsession with Friday Night Lights has
become sort of embarrassing. My husband, David, and I came to
the show late, by way of Netflix, but were hooked after Episode
1. We started watching two, three, four in one sitting. It began to
seem to me as if these characters were alive and moving around
in my world.
David was happy with the football. I was into the drama. I
worried about Smash, the sometimes-unstable star running back.
I dreamed about Tyra, who was being stalked. When I talked to
my own daughter, I flipped my hair back, just as Coach's wife,
Tami Taylor, does and paused before delivering nuggets of
wisdom. Once or twice, I even called David "Coach."
I was all set to watch Season 3 in real time when I heard, to my
horror, that it might not get made. But then NBC cut a weird
cost-sharing kind of deal with DirecTV, and the Dillon Panthers
are back in business. The episodes have already aired on
satellite, but I don't have a dish. So I'm just now settling in for
the new season.
But did I miss something? The field lights are on again in Dillon,
Texas, but the whole town seems to be suffering from a massive
bout of … amnesia. The previous season ended abruptly, after
seven episodes got swallowed by the writer's strike. For Season
3, the writers just wipe the slate clean and start again. Murder?
What murder? Landry is back to being the high-school sidekick,
and we can just forget that whole unfortunate body-dragged-outof-the-river detour. Tyra got a perm and is running for school
president. Lyla Garrity's preacher boyfriend, rival to Tim
Riggins, has disappeared.
Over the last season, the show was struggling for an identity. It
veered from The ABC Afterschool Special to CSI and then
finally found its footing in the last couple of episodes, especially
the one where Peter Berg—who directed the movie adaptation of
Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights and adapted it for
TV—walked on as Tami Taylor's hyper ex-boyfriend. In Season
3, the show is trying on yet another identity. Mrs. Taylor has
suddenly turned into Principal Taylor. With her tight suits and
her fabulous hair, she is Dillon's own Michelle Rhee, holding
meetings, discussing education policy, and generally working
too hard. Meanwhile, Coach keeps up the domestic front,
making breakfast for Julie with one hand while feeding baby
Grace with the other.
This strikes me as a little too close to home, and not in a way I
appreciate. The beauty of Friday Night Lights is that it managed
to make us care about the tiny town of Dillon. It drew us in with
football but then sunk us into town life. The show took lots of
stock types not usually made for prime time—a car dealer, an
arrogant black kid, an ex-star in a wheelchair, a grandma with
dementia, a soldier, lots of evangelical Christians—and brought
them to life. It was neither sentimental nor mocking, which is a
hard thing to pull off.
Now I feel as if I'm looking in a mirror. Tami is a mom juggling
work and kids and not doing such a good job. Coach is trying his
best at home but screwing up. The only town folk we see in the
first episode are Tim's brother and Tyra's sister, drunkenly
falling all over each other in a bar—the sorriest, white-trashiest
bar you can imagine. Our heart is with Tyra, who, just like the
children of the show's upscale fans, is trying to go to college.
The final, inspirational scene of the episode takes place in a
racquetball court. At least Smash has the good sense to note that
it's the whitest sport in America.
That said, Friday Night Lights would have to do a lot to lose my
loyalty. Just the fact that there was a high-drama plotline
centered on the Jumbotron is enough to keep me happy. It's one
of the show's great gifts, humor in unexpected places. Like when
Tim's brother, looking half drunk as always, tells him Lyla will
never respect him because he's a "rebound from Jesus." I'll give
this season a chance.
Click here to read the next entry.
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
Hey there, Hanna and Meghan,
While we're complaining, isn't this the third year that some of
these characters—Tim, Lyla, Tyra—have been seniors? The
producers seemed to be dealing with this small lapse in planning
by bringing on the soft lighting and lipstick. Tim looks ever
more like Matt Dillon in The Outsiders (not to sound like that
thirtysomething mom who was shagging him in the first season).
But I'm letting these objections go. I fell for this opener once
Coach and Mrs. Coach had one of those moments that make
their marriage a flawed gem.
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
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teenager, and yelling loudly enough to wake her baby. And I
love the writers for bringing it back around with a follow-up
scene in which Mrs. Coach tells her husband she's sorry, and he
says, "I could never be mad at my wife. It's that damn principal."
Way to compartmentalize.
Much as I appreciate Tami, I'm puzzled by a weird gap in her
life: She doesn't have girlfriends. I know that her sister showed
up last season, but that doesn't really explain the absence of
female friends. In fact, it's a pattern on the show: Julie's friend
Lois is more a prop than a character, Lyla never hangs out with
other girls, and although Tyra occasionally acts like a big sister
to Julie, she doesn't seem to have a close girlfriend, either. Does
this seem as strange to you as it does to me? In Lyla's case, I can
see it—she often acts like the kind of girl other girls love to hate
(and I look forward to dissecting why that's so). But Tami is the
kind of largehearted person whom other women would want to
befriend. The lack of female friendships on the show has become
like a missing tooth for me, especially when you consider the
vivid and interesting male friendships (Matt and Landry, Tim
and Jason, even Coach and Buddy Garrity). It's revealing in its
absence: No matter how good the show's writers are at
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.
Emily
Click here to read the next entry.
From: Meghan O'Rourke
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
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
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avoidance of the messiness of life that manifests itself in tidy
morals and overdramatized melodramas.
decent but can't fill the shoes. Riggins is noble but erratic. Smash
is dutiful but explosive.
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 …
Emily, that insight you had about Tami is so interesting, and it
made me see the whole show differently. At first I thought Peter
Berg must love women, because they drive all the action and
make all the good decisions. Then, after what you said, I realized
that for the most part, the women exist only to support the men.
They are wives or girlfriends or mothers but don't have many
independent relationships outside their own families. Judd
Apatow's women are a little like this, too. It's a male-centric
view, and helps explain why a Hollywood director would be so
in tune with the mores of a small conservative town.
Meghan
Click here for the next entry.
It's also why this season could get interesting. As the principal,
Tami is stretching the show in all kinds of ways. Buddy has shed
his vulnerability and is back to being the town bully. Coach is
stuck in the middle. All kinds of potential for drama.
From: Hanna Rosin
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
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
95/104
his brother and her sister snuck in a quickie (off-camera in the
bedroom).
I was glad to see that the writers are back to making Tyra and
Tim and their weary, beery sense of their own limitations the
center of our sympathy. Maybe Tyra will make it out of Dillon,
but not by acting like the Zeta girls in The House Bunny. And it
seems entirely in keeping with Tim's fragile nature that Buddy
Garrity could destroy his confidence with a few slashing
sentences. Speaking of, one of the honest and realistic
assumptions of this show is that when teenagers date, they have
sex. So I gave Buddy points when he warned his daughter away
from Tim in a speech that ended with "Lyla, are you using
protection?"
But enough about character development. Let's talk about some
football. I entirely agree, Meghan, that FNL generally gives us
too little gridiron, not too much. But in this episode, there is a
lovely sequence on the field. Coach Taylor is testing Smash
before a college tryout, and the former Panther star is cutting and
weaving just like old times—until Tim levels him. We hear the
crack and thud of the hit, and, for a moment, Smash lies heavy
and still on the ground. In this show, when a player goes down,
the dots connect to the paralyzing hit that put Jason Street in a
wheelchair. But Smash gets up, his rehabilitated knee sound, and
it's a moment of blessed relief, because now we can go on
rooting for him to regain his chance to … play in college and
turn pro? To write the sentence is to remember how long the
odds are for such an outcome and to rue the role that the dangled
dream of professional sports ends up playing for a lot of kids.
Given Jason's broken spine, you can't accuse Friday Night Lights
of pretending otherwise. But what do we think about the way its
best characters revel in the game and make us love it, too? I ask
myself the same question when I watch football with my sons
knowing that I'd never let them play it. In the nonfiction book on
which the show is based, author Buzz Bissinger writes of a
player who wasn't examined thoroughly after a groin injury: "He
lost the testicle but he did make All-State." There are also kids
who play through broken arms, broken ankles, and broken hands
and who pop painkillers or Valium. Across the country, highschool football is also associated with a frightening rate of
concussions. Would you let Coach Taylor anywhere near your
boys?
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 2: The Indelible Image of Buddy Garrity Doing Yoga
Posted Monday, January 26, 2009, at 6:31 AM ET
Indeed, Emily. It's a hallelujah moment when we're back to Tim,
Tyra, Matt, the lovable, evil Buddy, and all the other things I
treasure about FNL. This episode made me very hopeful about
the rest of the season. I especially liked the Smash subplot and
how it ties together what happens on the field with what happens
off. Smash, who graduated but lost his college scholarship, is
having a hard time remembering how to be Smash. Without the
Dillon Panthers, he's just a kid in an Alamo Freeze hat who goes
home every night to his mom. And that just about summarizes
the driving theme of the show. On the field, class, race, and all
the soul-draining realities of life in a small Texas town get
benched. But off the field, you can have clear eyes and a full
heart and still lose.
Despite their best efforts, Matt, Tyra, and Tim just can't seem to
transcend. Instead of gender differences, what's emerging
strongly this season is, as Emily points out, class differences. All
the couples in the show are divided along class lines, setting up
lots of potential for good drama. There's Tyra and Landry, Lyla
and Tim, and possibly Julie and Matt again. Emily, you pointed
out that great moment in the car where Julie and Matt have such
different ideas about what the future holds. Buddy gives us
another such moment, when he lectures Lyla about dating Tim:
"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.
96/104
To: Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 2: Is the Show Becoming Too Sentimental?
Hanna, Emily,
One thing I've been thinking about is Friday Night Lights'
distinctive brand of male sentimentality. This show seems
singularly designed to make men cry. Its lodestars are
comradeship on and off the field ("God, football, and Texas
forever," I recall Riggins toasting with Jason Street in the very
first episode); a modern blend of paradoxically stoic
emotionalism (epitomized by Coach Taylor); and a recurrent,
choked-up love of the tough women who make these men's
attachment to football possible. This may be the West, but in
Dillon, Texas, John Ford's American masculinity has been
diluted with a cup of New Man sensitivity.
Take this episode's key scene between Matt Saracen and his
grandmother: Debating whether to take his ailing grandmother to
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.
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
97/104
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.
To: Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon
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?
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
98/104
From: Emily Bazelon
Subject: Week 3: Deciphering the Bronzed Diaper
their pushy football worship? I couldn't quite decide how to read
him in that moment.
Posted Monday, February 2, 2009, at 7:18 AM ET
Yes, Meghan, Tami is being played by Katie McCoy. In part
because she wants to be. I found their pairing off all too
recognizable: They have that spark two women get when they
see something in each other that they want and don't have. Their
friendship, or maybe it will prove an infatuation, is a trying-on
of identity. So, yes, Katie is using Tami to entrench her son's
status on the team and to show off her wealth. And Tami refuses
to notice, because it suits her purposes not to. A party at Katie's
house means no clogged toilets at Tami's (and, oh yes, that my
rang in my ears, too). I particularly loved the moment when
Tami enters Katie's glittering, ostentatious house and her new
friend and hostess puts an arm around her waist and they sail off
together into the living room in their evening dresses, husbands
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
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
99/104
Posted Monday, February 2, 2009, at 4:05 PM ET
Hanna, Emily,
I thought J.D. was trying to make a joke that didn't come off. It's
my guess, too, that we're not supposed to be able to read his
reaction, because he's not sure himself. He's angry, but he also
sees the ridiculousness of his parents' shrine to him. One thing
we haven't discussed: With the McCoys comes the FNL's first
depiction of that modern affliction known as helicopter
parenting. I suppose, to be accurate, that Joe is actually a more
specific type: a form of stage parent, the obsessed parent-coach.
Here is a parent who is helping drive his son into developing his
talents but who also just might drive him crazy by pushing too
hard.
This introduces a new theme for FNL, right? Until now, overinvolvement wasn't a problem for any of the parents on the
show. In fact, the parenting problems all had to do with moms
and dads who were notably absent (in the case of Matt and Tim,
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.)
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."
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.
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
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.
100/104
From: Emily Bazelon
To: Meghan O'Rourke and Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 4: What's the Deal With Saracen's Mom?
I'm on Mars with David: I think the superintendent was dead set
against Tami, too. The battle over the JumboTron is a fight she
shouldn't have picked—not as a new principal who clearly has
no political capital, because it's a fight she couldn't win. There's
a practical reason for this that in my mind blurs her moral claim
here: The donors gave earmarked funds, whatever Tami's
technical authority to ignore their wishes. And there's also, of
course, the larger metaphorical meaning of the JumboTron:
Dillon is about football first. In Friday Night Lights the book,
this primacy makes itself similarly felt. The real school that's a
model for Dillon High spends more on medical supplies for
football players than on teaching supplies for English teachers.
And the head of the English department makes two-thirds the
salary of the football coach, who also gets the free use of a new
car.
Hopeless as Tami's plea is, Katie coaxes her to try by instructing
that "nobody likes an angry woman." It's Tami's anger that's
making her fumble and bumble. That's hard for us to watch, I
think, because it brings up a lot of baggage about women in
authority being seen as bitches. Tami remembers Katie's words
and tells the superintendent, "I'm not angry," but her voice is full
of righteous indignation, so he can't hear her.
Before my inner feminist erupted, however, I reminded myself
that Tami was to blame, too, for playing the politics wrong. She
blew her honeymoon on a lost cause. (Here's hoping Obama
doesn't make the same rookie mistake.) That's why it rings false
when Eric tells her that she was right, unconvincingly
contradicting himself from a couple of episodes ago.
I don't share your despair, though, because Tami is already
bouncing back. She used the JumboTron announcement to do
what she should have done from the get go: co-opt Buddy
Garrity into raising the kind of money she needs by making him
host a silent auction for the school at his car dealership. You
can't beat Dillon's football fat cats if you're Tami. You have to
join them.
Meanwhile, even as Eric is being valorized in this episode—that
lingering shot of the "Coach Eric Taylor" sign on his door was
for anyone who missed the theme—he doesn't entirely live up to
his billing. Yes, he gets big points for getting Smash to college.
(Since I am still caught up in the glory of last Sunday's Super
Bowl—how about that game!—I'm feeling kindlier toward the
idea of Smash playing college ball, though I reserve the right to
come to my senses and start worrying about his brain getting
battered.) But what is Eric thinking by dividing quarterback
duties between Matt and J.D., and running a different offense for
each? It's baby-splitting, and it bodes badly. I'm betting against
the Panthers in the next game. Related point of ongoing
frustration: The writers seem to have settled back into portraying
J.D. as robotic and empty-headed, the boy with Xbox between
his ears.
Matt, by too-obvious contrast, is ever the thoughtful, winsome
struggler. You're right, Hanna, that his mother is a
disappointment. I was happy to meet Shelby because she's
played by one of my favorite actresses from Deadwood. But I
don't believe in her character, either. Where's the sordid
underbelly—the lack of caring, or mental illness, or selfishness
that would help us understand why she left her child? Knowing
that Matt's dad is a jerk only makes her act of abandonment less
explicable. And so I'm waiting for the bitter reality check: I was
ready for Shelby to start to disappoint by not showing up as
promised to take Matt's grandmother to the doctor. But there she
was, right on time. I don't buy the pat self-redemption, and I
hope the show goes deeper and darker.
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
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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.
inspire his teammates? J.D. may have the skills but is going to
have to get some gumption before he takes this team as far as it
can go.
Though, yeah, it'll probably go wrong. For the sake of drama, at
least.
Curious to hear your thoughts …
Back to our regularly scheduled programming: Yes, Hanna, I
find Matt's mom too good to be true. And the writers seem to
know it, because they are hardly even trying to give her
interesting lines. She's like a relentless optimist's idea of a
deadbeat mom. And, Emily, I agree with you about Tami: She
flubbed the JumboTron wars by choosing to wage the wrong
skirmish in the larger battle. Those were earmarked funds. She's
got to figure out a way to guilt the boosters into giving her
money; she can't just demand it.
Meanwhile, I find myself in agreement with Mindy for once:
That Cash sure is a fine lookin' cowboy. In this episode, Tyra's a
kind of parallel to Tami: Both are struggling and making some
bad decisions. In Tyra's case, it's ditching geeky sweetheart
Landry—who clearly adores her—after his dental surgery in
order to make out with Cash, a bad boy with big blue eyes and a
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
Meghan
From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Week 4: I'll Take the Brooding Drunk Over the Sweet-Talking PillPopper
Meghan, I agree with your wild-card theory. I've always thought
the show doesn't touch a nerve because it's too straightforwardly
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.
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)
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6.
Landry's electric guitar and amp
Subject: Week 4: Dillon's McMansion District Located!
Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2009, at 10:30 AM ET
Hanna,
Well, if I had to choose between Tim Riggins and Cash, I'd go
for the brooding drunk, too. In any case, your Brokeback
Mountain reference has shamed me out of my crush. I always
fall too easily for the glib talkers.
Meanwhile, though, it looks like Dillon's real-life counterpart
does have a McMansion district. Welcome to the McCoy home.
It even has a hobby room for his trophies.
Things About Me" began to chew its way through Facebook.
The author of one of these notes would itemize her personality
into "16 random things, facts, habits, or goals," then tag 16
friends who would be prompted to write their own lists. And so
on and so on. Similar navel-gazing letters had popped up over
the years through e-mail and on blogs, MySpace, Friendster, and
the venerable blogging site LiveJournal. The Facebook strain
had a good run, but by the end of 2008 it appeared to have
stagnated.
Then something curious happened: It mutated. Since everyone
who participates is supposed to paste the original instructions
into her own note, it's easy to tinker with the rules. Soon enough,
16 things (and 16 tagged friends) morphed into 15—and 17 and
22 and 35 and even 100. As the structure crumbled, more users
toyed with the boundaries. Like any disease, "Random Things"
was mutating in hopes of finding a strain that uniquely suited its
host. In this case, the right number was vital to its survival: The
more people who are tagged, the more likely the note is to
spread. The longer the list, though, the more daunting it is to
compose and the fewer participants will be roped in.
Meghan
By mid-to-late January, "25 Random Things About Me" had
warded off its competitors. Once the letter settled on 25 things (a
perfect square, just like 16) the phenomenon exploded. The data
we collected reveal a clear tipping point around this time.
webhead
As the graph below indicates (Fig. 1), the number of people
swept up in the trend climbed steeply for a week starting around
Jan. 20, peaking in the last days of the month before declining
sharply. Not coincidentally, the Web analytics firm Compete
reports that January 2009 was one of Facebook's biggest months
for traffic growth.
Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on
Facebook
The evolutionary roots of Facebook's "25 Things" craze.
By Chris Wilson
A graph of when people wrote their own 25 Things note (Fig. 2)
forms a very similar curve.
Last week, I enlisted Slate readers to help divine how
Facebook's "25 Random Things About Me" trend got started.
More than 3,000 of you responded, answering queries on when
you first saw a "25 Things" note, when you were first tagged,
and when (if ever) you wrote your own note. On one level, the
survey was a failure: I had hoped to find the trend's Patient Zero,
but there's likely no single person who conceived of this scheme.
But the absence of a singular "25 Things" creator reveals
something much more interesting: Facebook organisms are not
created by intelligent design. They evolve.
The idea that culture spreads in biological ways has been around
for a while. Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976's
The Selfish Gene to describe how ideas propagate according to
evolutionary principles of mutation and selection. A quantitative
study of the "25 Things" letter seems to ratify that.
As many readers noted in our survey, "25 Things" wasn't always
"25 Things." Late last fall, a chain letter titled "16 Random
Since I'm no evolutionary expert, I shipped Slate's data to
Lauren Ancel Meyers, a biology professor at the University of
Texas who models the spread of infectious diseases
mathematically. Meyers says that around Day 39 of Fig. 1, we
see the "classic exponential growth of an epidemic curve." (Day
39 in this graph is Jan. 8.) She also explains that "25 Things"
authors can be seen as "contagious" under what's known as a
"susceptible-infected-recovered" model for the spread of disease.
Think of "25 Things" authors as being contagious for one day—
the day they tag a bunch of their friends. Meyers found that, for
that one day, the growth parameter of the "25 Things" disease
during its ascent phase (roughly until the beginning of February)
was 0.27. This means that, on average, each "25 Things" writer
inspired 1.27 new notes.
Another one of our survey questions considered the average
number of days between when a person is tagged and when she
writes a note. Those results are graphed here.
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The highest percentage of respondents—17 percent of those who
wrote a note—composed their missive the same day they were
first tagged. The numbers decay from there, and the median
value is three days. Meyers found that this too was best
described exponentially, though the figures decline instead of
increase over time. You can think of it like radioactive decay. In
the same way that, say, Thorium-231 atoms have about a 50
percent chance of decaying each day, regardless of how many
days they've been around, people tagged in a "25 Things" note
do not become more or less likely to participate as time passes.
Meyers does note, however, that these calculations do not factor
in individuals who choose not to participate or have yet to do so.
Why does it appear that the "25 Things" fad has died out? One
could argue that a selection bias in Slate's data are exaggerating
the decline, as those who haven't yet encountered the meme are
likely underrepresented. I don't think this is the case, though. As
we see in Fig. 3, most people write their notes within a week of
being tagged for the first time. The decline we see in Figures 1
and 2, then, is likely legitimate: Because the fad peaked more
than 10 days ago, it's unlikely that there is a large number of
people who've been tagged who are still waiting to write their
own note. My guess is that, like a Ponzi scheme, "25 Things"
fizzled as soon as Facebook ran out of willing participants.
Anecdotally, there don't seem to be a lot of people left who are
sitting around, waiting to be tagged.
All in all, Facebook infections look remarkably similar to human
ones. And like organisms, the odds do seem stacked against all
but the fittest of memes. The "Notes" application—including the
ability to tags friends—has been a feature of Facebook since
August 2006, a Facebook spokeswoman told me on Tuesday.
(The PR rep also confirmed that Facebook itself had no part in
sparking the trend.) The fact that it took two-and-a-half years for
a Notes-based meme to hit it big suggests long odds.
Still, viral marketers might take note of the patterns that "25
Random Things About Me" obeyed. The best hope for someone
looking to start a grass-roots craze is to introduce a wide variety
of schemes into the wild and pray like hell that one of them
evolves into a virulent meme. If evolution is any guide, however,
there's no predicting what succeeds and what doesn't. Just look
at the platypus.
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Slate.com

Transcription

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