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fighting words
Is Obama Another Dukakis?
foreigners
Advanced Search
Saving Jerusalem
architecture
foreigners
The Pentagon Memorial
Fixing Failed Aid
art
gardening
Morandi Returns to Earth
"Autumn Is a Second Spring"
books
green room
Jefferson's Other Family
Adam Smith Meets Climate Change
bushisms
heavy petting
Bushism of the Day
Hospice Dog
bushisms
history lesson
Bushism of the Day
You Won't Learn Much From the Debates
chatterbox
hot document
Why Washington Hates Wall Street
Jesse Jackson vs. Wall Street Bailout
corrections
hot document
Corrections
Too Sexy for My Sandbox
culture gabfest
jurisprudence
The Culture Gabfest, End of Days Edition
Wall Street Strip
culturebox
jurisprudence
One and Done
Ten To Toss
day to day
low concept
Poll Vaulting
First Palin, Then Campaign Suspension. What Now?
dear prudence
map the candidates
My Bloody Valentine
One Stumper
diary
moneybox
Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan
Why Congress Is Failing America
dvd extras
moneybox
Mad Women
The End of the BSD
election scorecard
moneybox
Battleground Bump
Nice Bailout. Now Pay for It!
explainer
movies
What Does It Mean To Suspend a Campaign?
Choke
explainer
music box
No, Really, How Much Is $700 Billion?
The Big Rewind
explainer
other magazines
Wall Street Suicides
Bailout Blues
family
poem
Spare the Rod
"Though Your Sins Be Scarlet"
politics
the green lantern
Debate Thyself
Dirty Dogs and Carbon Cats
politics
the has-been
Sarah Palin's Media Training
Too Broke To Fail
politics
the spectator
Stunt Man
Shakespeare's Bootlegger, Dylan's Biographer, Nabokov, and Me
politics
the undercover economist
Biden's Gaffe Immunity
Burn Her!
politics
today's business press
Troopergate vs. Troopergate: Who's Crying Now?
"This Sucker Could Go Down"
press box
today's papers
McCain Bites the Press
Things Fall Apart
recycled
today's papers
Packing Heat in Helsinki
Clear and Present Danger
Schoolhouse Rock
today's papers
A Charter-School Setback?
Looking Back in Anger
Science
today's papers
Atomic Prose
Bail Me Out Tonight
Science
today's papers
Republicans Are From Mars, Democrats Are From Venus
Wall Street at a Crossroads
slate v
today's papers
Open Book: Jonathan Safran Foer
$700,000,000,000
slate v
today's papers
What Was I Thinking? Junk in the Trunk
Mortgaging the Future
slate v
well-traveled
Dear Prudence: Trysting in My Sleep
The Mongolia Obsession
sports nut
This Call to the Bullpen Is Eroding My Stomach Lining
swingers
The Colorado Purple
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
technology
The Cell Phone Wars
technology
Chuck Knol
television
Knight Rider 2.0
architecture
The Pentagon Memorial
It tells us more than we need to know—and, at the same time, not enough.
By Witold Rybczynski
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 7:13 AM ET
the big idea
Obama's Message Deficit
The Big Sort
Why No One Trusts the Government To Fix Anything Anymore
The $22 million memorial commemorating the 184 people who
perished in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was dedicated two
weeks ago. A memorial may be beautiful or homely,
sophisticated or crude, monumental or unassuming: That's not
really the point. A rough stone stele can be as effective as an
intricately carved marble catafalque. But, as Andrew Butterfield
wrote in the New Republic a few years ago in the context of a
9/11 memorial at Ground Zero, a memorial does need to do three
things: It marks a spot, it says who, and it says so forever. How
does the Pentagon Memorial fulfill these requirements?
The Pentagon is a surprisingly low building whose immense
bulk only becomes apparent as you walk around it, which you
must do to get from the nearest Metro stop to the memorial. The
two-acre site is immediately adjacent to the place where
American Airlines Flight 77 struck. Hence, much of the power
of this particular memorial derives from the simple fact that it
marks the actual place where the event occurred. Because each
of the victims is commemorated by an individual marker—
which the designers of the memorial, Julie Beckman and Keith
Kaseman, refer to as "memorial units" but which everyone else
calls "benches"—the place resembles a cemetery. Intervening
rows of maple trees create the impression of an ancient burial
grove. The allusion seems fitting. At dusk, when I was there, the
cluster of softly illuminated benches, on which people had left
flowers and notes, was a distinctly moving sight. Every few
minutes, the roar of an outgoing flight from nearby Reagan
National Airport added to the poignancy.
addition, the water is rippling, though the gurgling sound is
barely perceptible due to the drone of traffic on nearby I-395. It
all struck me as contrived—and impractical. The evening I was
there, although the memorial was barely two weeks old, a crew
of maintenance workers was painstakingly removing stones and
debris that had made their way into the pools—most of the
walking surfaces are composed of loose gravel. Memorials are
traditionally made out of granite, marble, or bronze, not only to
last "forever," but also to convey a sense of perpetuity. On that
score, the Pentagon Memorial seems more like an art installation
than a monument for the ages.
art
Morandi Returns to Earth
An Italian master at the Met.
By Christopher Benfey
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 11:37 AM ET
Click here to read a slide-show essay on Giorgio Morandi.
.
The benches are arranged in rows according to the year of birth
of the victim, the years (which are indicated on adjacent sitting
walls) ranging from 1998 to 1930. In addition, an encircling wall
rises from 3 inches tall, representing the youngest person
killed—a 3-year-old child—to a height of 71 inches, the age of
the oldest victim. The rows of benches are arranged parallel to
the trajectory of Flight 77, and the benches face one way or the
other, depending on whether the individual died on the plane or
in the building. This may be more than we need to know—and
not enough. The design of the Pentagon Memorial is Minimalist
and avoids the deplorable contemporary fashion of using
memorials as excuses for education, as if the public needed to be
told what and how to remember. But unlike the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, which tells us "who" but also has an
underlying structure—a beginning and an end, a descent and an
ascent, the implied promise of redemption—the Pentagon
Memorial merely provides statistics. How many people died,
who was in the plane and who in the building, how old they
were. Moving as the ensemble is, the overall effect is also oddly
unresolved, almost nihilistic. "This happened," the memorial
seems to say. "We don't know why, and we don't know what it
means."
The benches of the Pentagon Memorial are cast from stainless
steel, and each bench cantilevers over an individual pool of
water. It is unclear whether the water is intended to suggest a
common thread tying the victims together or is there merely to
diffuse a glowing light that comes from an underwater lamp. In
.
.
books
Jefferson's Other Family
His concubine was also his wife's half-sister.
By François Furstenberg
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 6:52 AM ET
When DNA evidence corroborated the long-standing rumor of a
relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally
Hemings, the news made headlines around the world. It should
not have. Though usually kept hidden, few things were more
common in plantation societies than sexual encounters between
white slave owners and female slaves. What makes the
Jefferson-Hemings story noteworthy is the family connection
they shared. Sally was not just an enslaved woman; she was the
half-sister of Jefferson's dead wife. And in Virginia, observes
Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at New York Law School and
member of the history faculty at Rutgers, "a man who married
his deceased wife's sister was engaging in incest."*
This "Gordian knot of family relationships" serves as the ligature
holding together a remarkable new book, The Hemingses of
Monticello. Gordon-Reed, author of a previous work on the
Jefferson-Hemings relationship, is just the person to cut through
the tangle. The story begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in
1735 of a white father and an enslaved African woman, who
became the property of John Wayles, an English immigrant to
Virginia. Wayles married three white women and buried them
all before he and Elizabeth Hemings became involved. Hemings
went on to have eight children with Wayles, including Sally, the
descendant of two generations of white man/slave woman
relationships.
Jefferson to Paris, where he was apprenticed to some of France's
greatest chefs and learned the art of high French cooking. His
14-year-old sister, Sally, joined him three years later, escorting
Jefferson's daughter (and her half-niece) Polly. Almost certainly
speaking better French than Jefferson, "Gimme" (Jimmy)
mingled with the city's important black and colored community,
while "Salait" (Sally), dressed in her Paris finery, accompanied
Polly's sister to the city's grand aristocratic balls. By 1789, when
they witnessed the outbreak of the French Revolution, the
Hemings siblings had seen "more of the world and experienced
more of what was in it than the vast majority of their
countrymen, white or black."
The Hemings-Jefferson family connection began in 1772, when
Wayles' daughter Martha, born to one of his white wives,
married Jefferson. The Hemingses, of course, knew of their
blood ties to Martha; what Martha knew remains shrouded. The
ability of whites to deny reality was legendary: "Every lady tells
you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's
household," Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut famously
observed, "but those in her own she seems to think drop from the
clouds." By all indications, Martha Jefferson bore few illusions,
however, and it is unlikely she harbored any resentment about
her father's liaison, since in 1774 Elizabeth Hemings and her
children moved to Monticello, where they were immediately
"singled out" for special roles.
That fateful year, the 16-year-old Sally became pregnant by then
46-year-old Jefferson (such age differences were not uncommon
at the time), and the two Hemingses returned to the United
States. Like Jim and Huck sailing down the Mississippi toward
New Orleans, James and Sally left France, where they could
have claimed their freedom, to cross the Atlantic with Jefferson,
back to the slave state of Virginia.
Four generations of Hemingses proceeded to serve the Jefferson
household in its most intimate realms. One of Elizabeth's sons
became Jefferson's butler and another his valet, while James, a
third, became a personal servant. Trained for highly skilled and
sensitive jobs, the Hemingses were granted tremendous
autonomy, living in circumstances almost unique for Virginia
slaves: a privileged, close-knit family, mostly literate, dressed
not in sackcloth but in Irish linen, muslin, and calico, with skin
color so light that several of them later passed as whites. They
were, in short, "a caste apart."
Sally had struck a bargain, which Gordon-Reed explores at
length. Jefferson promised her a comfortable home surrounded
by kin and freedom to their children—both promises he kept.
Gordon-Reed admits we can never know the true nature of their
relationship or fully pierce "the veiled nature of her existence."
Did she, could she, have loved him? Did he love her? The
questions loom over the whole account. Over the course of their
years together, Sally bore Jefferson seven children, four of
whom lived into adulthood and resembled him more than his
legitimate descendants, both physically and temperamentally.
All but one quietly passed into the white community as adults.
On her deathbed, in 1782, Martha made Jefferson promise he
would never remarry. Her request made it almost inevitable that
family history would repeat itself. Indeed, her act bears eerie
parallels to the biblical account that so moved Jefferson when he
traveled through Europe: that of the barren Sarah giving her
husband, Abraham, a beautiful slave woman with whom to
father his descent. It is hard not to wonder whether Jefferson
came to believe his dead wife had similarly bestowed her halfsister Sally, who would bear him his only sons. Unlike the
biblical story, however—and crucial in a society rooted in
property rights and family connections—Jefferson's children
with his bondswoman would be forever illegitimate, ensuring
that Martha's daughters would never have to compete for
Jefferson's inheritance.
As Jefferson climbed the political world, becoming secretary of
state and later president, the Hemingses continued their strange
existence "at once at the center and periphery of momentous
events in the life of the nation." James cooked the food over
which the famous "dinner table bargain" among Jefferson, James
Madison, and Alexander Hamilton was settled. Other members
of the Hemings family continued to perform the most intimate
jobs as valets, nurses, cooks, and nannies, while later generations
were trained as highly skilled artisans. They spent more time at
Monticello than Jefferson did, and made it their home as much
as his. A few successfully negotiated their freedom; some simply
walked away; others were given away as wedding presents to
Jefferson's white daughters. Most of the Hemingses, however,
remained at Monticello until Jefferson's death, when the tragic
denouement finally took place. The assets of the heavily
indebted estate, including some of the Hemingses, were sold to
pay off creditors, and a family that had struggled heroically to
stay together—over decades, even across oceans—was finally
torn asunder.
When the grief-stricken Jefferson was appointed U.S. minister to
France after his wife's death, James Hemings accompanied
Gordon-Reed has pulled off an astonishing feat of historical recreation, involving equal measures of painstaking archival
detective work, creative historical imagination, and balanced
judgment. She masterfully fills in gaps from fragmentary
evidence. While her patient assessment of the strengths and
weaknesses of various interpretations often slows the book's
pace to a crawl, her caution is understandable. In shining a
spotlight on "the shadow world of slavery," she ventures into the
most painful and fraught issues in American history—the rape of
enslaved women, tensions between light- and dark-skinned
blacks, the legacy of white supremacy, and the possibilities for
slaves' autonomy, to name only a few. Black women are the
central characters in a story that challenges some of the nation's
most cherished narratives. In contrast to so much popular work
on the Revolutionary era, history is viewed here not through the
eyes a Founding Father but through those of the people he
enslaved.
This is not a banal stab at unmasking the biases of American
history, however. Of course the Hemingses lived lives
constrained by the social categories imposed on them: They
remained slaves in a slave society, and black enough in a nation
committed to white supremacy. But the book's subject is not the
categories themselves; Gordon-Reed doesn't use the Hemings
family as a metaphor for the "black experience," or Sally
Hemings to humanize "slave women." She focuses instead on
the individuals who struggled messily to survive despite these
categories and, every once in a while, broke through them.
th
The result offers unparalleled insight into an 18 -century
Virginian world in which rigid racial boundaries were
impossible to police. Interracial relationships raised few
eyebrows, and John Wayles' political career never suffered from
his concubinage with Elizabeth Hemings. One of the Hemings
sisters, Mary, was leased to a local white merchant, Thomas
Bell, and the two became lovers. At her request, Jefferson sold
Mary to Bell, and the couple lived openly in what was, in effect,
a common-law marriage; their children quietly became free by
sanction of the community, if not the law. In 1802, when
newspaperman James Callendar first reported Jefferson's
relationship with Hemings, his account suggested how widely
known their relationship was in local circles, where Hemings
appeared like "something like a wife to Jefferson."
Jefferson's mixed-race children remained in the United States,
fusing into the white community seamlessly: an eloquent
rebuttal to Jefferson's public denunciation of racial mixture and
his endorsement of blacks' expulsion from America. Alas, his
words carried more weight than his actions in a nation
increasingly committed to slavery and racism, and Jefferson's
descendants and biographers sought to redraw the categories his
life had blurred, writing the Hemingses out of history in a quest,
as Gordon-Reed puts it, "to maintain the ownership over black
people's identities in perpetuity."
There, perhaps, lies the fullest significance of this remarkable
family's story: It makes that perpetual ownership impossible.
Correction, Sept. 24, 2008: François Furstenberg originally
referred to Annette Gordon-Reed as a professor at New York
University. She is a professor at New York Law School and a
member of the history faculty at Rutgers. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
bushisms
Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 2:24 PM ET
"We're fixing to go down to Galveston and obviously are going
to see a devastated part of this fantastic state."—Houston, Sept.
16, 2008
See video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 3:10.
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see
"The Complete Bushisms."
.
.
The Hemings story also casts new light on Jefferson, portrayed
as an agonized hypocrite in much recent scholarship. He
emerges instead as a man whose life can be fully understood
only through its relationship with slavery. The private Jefferson,
in Gordon-Reed's reading, did not simply express his fascination
with human cultivation and control through the architecture of
Monticello, but even more through his relations with the
Hemingses and his other slaves. Though he could never see them
as "separate from his own needs, desires, and fears," they
nevertheless recast his life: The Hemingses gave him "a
beautiful younger mistress and children, who could be shaped
into some version of his private self—woodworker, musician,
and sometimes gardener."
.
bushisms
Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 2:35 PM ET
"The people in Louisiana must know that all across our country
there's a lot of prayer—prayer for those whose lives have been
turned upside down. And I'm one of them."—Baton Rouge, La.,
Sept. 3, 2008
Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at
3:40.
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see
"The Complete Bushisms."
.
.
chatterbox
Why Washington Hates Wall Street
An 80-year rivalry explained.
By Timothy Noah
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 3:47 PM ET
"When financial institutions are suffering a crisis in faith about
themselves, journalists are inherently a little bit more prudent
and cautious."—Marcus Brauchli, newly installed executive
editor of the Washington Post, as quoted in the Sept. 21 New
York Times.
The turmoil in the financial markets may occasion prudence in
financial journalism, most especially at the Wall Street Journal,
where during the previous 24 years Brauchli worked his way up
from copy editor to foreign correspondent to managing editor
before being squeezed out by Rupert Murdoch. But it's a sign of
Brauchli's newbie status in Washington, where he has never
previously worked, that he should think reporters at the
Washington Post feel anything other than schadenfreude about
Wall Street's tumble in fortunes. They can't help it—they're
Washingtonians. Washington is a city that glories in Wall
Street's misfortunes.
"Isn't this exciting?" Rep. Ed Markey enthused to me on Oct. 19,
1987 ("Black Monday"). A young congressional correspondent
for Newsweek with nary a stock or bond to my name, even I was
taken aback by Markey's undisguised pleasure. When you stop
and think about it, though, it makes perfect sense. Modern
Washington owes its very existence to the 1929 crash, which
occasioned a vast expansion of the federal government under
President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A legacy of the increase in
federal power during that era, largely undiminished during a 28year electoral backlash against big government, is that
Washington became Wall Street's principal rival when it came to
running the world. Which wielded more power—the financial
markets or the government? Uncle Sam had the world's largest
military, but Wall Street had all that goddamned money. The
mansions in Greenwich, Conn.; the trophy wives; the private
jets—by comparison, the people who wielded power in
Washington—including most presidents—were petits bourgeois.
Even libertarian conservatives resent, on a personal level, the
Wall Street swells whose interests they fight for daily. There
aren't a lot of millionaires working at the Cato Institute.
For Wall Street, a way of life may be coming to an end. For
Washington, a new era of government activism has already
begun. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, after presiding over
an unprecedented sequence of receiverships, bailouts, and
liquidations, is urging Congress to commit up to $700 billion to
unfreeze the credit markets. The CEOs of once-powerful
investment banks will be called down to Congress and subjected
to humiliating questions. Journalists will sign six-figure
contracts to write books about the events of what is already
being dubbed "Black September." Think-tankers will hold
conferences to fight over the proper role government should
assume in the new financial world. The Washington Post—
which, like all big-city dailies, has been experiencing some
circulation difficulty—will sell more papers than it would
otherwise. Presidential candidates are already demanding, and
will probably receive, curbs on CEO pay as a condition of
restoring liquidity to Wall Street. (Paulson, who's more a Wall
Street guy than a Washington guy, resists this because he fears it
may limit CEOs' willingness to sell their bum loans to Treasury.
What he doesn't realize is that once Congress grasps that these
CEOs would literally rather see their companies fail than take a
pay cut, it will answer as one: "All right, then. Fail away.")
Let me put it in terms a smart financial journalist like Brauchli
can readily understand. On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys
jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.
corrections
Corrections
Friday, September 26, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET
In a Sept. 25 "Trailhead" post, Somerset Perry stated that former
Weather Underground member William Ayers is a professor at
the University of Chicago. In fact, he is a professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, a separate institution.
In the Sept. 23 "Books," François Furstenberg wrote that
Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor at New York University.
She is a professor at New York Law School and a member of the
history faculty at Rutgers.
In a Sept. 23 "Politics," on Dahlia Lithwick erroneously used the
name of trooper Mike Wooten instead of his boss Walt
Monegan.
In the Sept. 18 "Culturebox," Nate DiMeo misspelled Sidney
Poitier's name.
In the Sept. 18 "Today's Papers," Daniel Politi omitted the word
"with" in a quote from the Wall Street Journal.
Due to a copy-editing error, the Sept. 16 "Ad Report Card"
misquoted a line from the trailer for Zack and Miri Make a
Porno. In the trailer, Rogen's character says he would like to
watch "a tape of Rosie O'Donnell getting fucked stupid."
In the Sept. 16 "Press Box," Jack Shafer incorrectly stated that
Rep. Tom Foley represented Massachusetts. He represented
Washington state. Shafer misidentified William Maloni as
former chief of staff for Rep. Richard Baker, R-La. Maloni
worked for Rep. William S. Moorhead, D-Penn., the Federal
Home Loan Bank Board, and the Federal Reserve before joining
Fannie Mae, where he worked in government relations for more
than 20 years.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a
Slate story, please send an e-mail to
corrections@slate.com, and we will investigate.
General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
Foster Wallace, and the latest Microsoft ads from that lovable
comedy duo Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the Oliver Stone film Wall
Street.
Jim Cramer's take on the financial crisis in New York magazine.
Michael Lewis' book Liar's Poker: Rising Through the
Wreckage on Wall Street.
Bob Rafelson's 1970 film, Five Easy Pieces.
Slate's "Obit" for David Foster Wallace.
A David Foster Wallace essay from Harper's, "Democracy,
English, and the Wars over Usage."
The second Microsoft ad featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.
The newer Microsoft "I'm a PC" ad campaign.
Slate's ad critic's assessment of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the
advertising firm behind the Seinfeld/Gates ads.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: David Foster Wallace's essay "A Supposedly Fun
Thing I'll Never Do Again."
Julia's pick: the Emmy-Award winning show 30 Rock.
Stephen's pick: Edmund Wilson's book, To the Finland Station.
You can reach the Culture Gabfest at culturefest@slate.com.
Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on Sept. 24, 2008 at 12:00 p.m.
Sept. 10, 2008
culture gabfest
The Culture Gabfest, End of Days
Edition
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 16 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
Listen to Slate's show about the week in culture.
By Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 12:20 PM ET
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 17 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana
Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking
here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the cultural
impact of the financial meltdown, the death of author David
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking
here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the tabloid
coverage of Sarah Palin's personal life, the new Rachel Maddow
show on MSNBC, and the hyperquirky Microsoft ad featuring
heroes from yesteryear Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
People magazine's Sarah Palin cover story.
Us magazine's article on Palin's pregnant daughter.
National Enquirer's Palin controversy article.
Hanna Rosin's Slate article on why Christian conservatives love
Palin.
The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.
Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas?: How
Conservatives Won the Heart of America.
The Microsoft ad featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Julia's pick: Hunter S. Thompson's classic Fear and Loathing:
On the Campaign Trail '72.
John's pick: Neil Diamond's latest release, Home Before Dark.
Stephen's pick: Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain.
You can reach the Culture Gabfest at culturefest@slate.com.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on Aug. 27, 2008 at 11:00 a.m.
Julia's pick: Cycle 11 of America's Next Top Model and the
show's first transgendered model, Isis.
Dana's pick: Gregory Curtis' book The Cave Painters.
Stephen's pick: the blog Naked Capitalism.
Correction, Sept. 11, 2008: In this podcast, Stephen incorrectly
referred to the proprietor of Naked Capitalism, Ives Smith, as a
"he." In fact, Ives Smith is a woman.
You can reach the Culture Gabfest at culturefest@slate.com.
Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on Sept. 10, 2008 at 10:40 a.m.
Aug. 27, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 15 with Stephen Metcalf, John
Swansburg, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio
player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking
here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the merits and
frivolities of Mad Men, the odds that Tropic Thunder will revive
Tom Cruise's career, and the new documentary film Man on
Wire.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
The official Web site for AMC's Mad Men.
Troy Patterson's Slate assessment of Mad Men's appeal.
The official Web site for Tropic Thunder.
Dana Stevens' Slate review of Tropic Thunder.
Stevens fields questions and comments from Slate's readers
about the touchy issues in Tropic Thunder.
The Man on Wire Web site.
Dana Stevens' Slate review of Man on Wire.
David Edelstein's New York magazine review of Man on Wire.
culturebox
One and Done
How not to be the first contestant kicked off a reality show.
By Joanna Weiss
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 12:57 PM ET
There's no television type quite so pathetic as the first person
dropped from a reality show. He's the embodiment of broken
dreams, the guy who survives the rigorous casting process, films
the opening credits, tastes the elixir of TV fame … then gets
booted in Episode 1. And usually, there's good reason. He's too
abrasive, too inflexible, or just too amorphous to last.
Reality producers say once filming begins, it's often easy to see
who's expendable. "You're always pulling people aside and
coaching them and telling them, 'This isn't what we picked,' "
says Stuart Krasnow, executive producer of NBC's Average Joe
and Oxygen's The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency. "Some
people never pop, and other people pop beyond your dreams."
When CBS's Survivor debuts tomorrow night, will you be able to
spot the contestant who doesn't make it past Episode 1? Can you
identify the warning signs of first-episode implosion? What
follows is a catalog of failed reality types—and a series of
lessons gleaned from their bad examples.
Lesson 1: Don't be dull.
In the premiere of the current season of Bravo's Project Runway,
designers Jerry and Stella, charged with making clothes from
items in a grocery store, created outfits that seemed equally
hideous. Stella sheathed a model in garbage bags. Jerry made a
shapeless raincoat from a shower curtain. Yet in the end, it was
Stella who survived.
Why was Jerry the first to go home? It was a matter of charisma,
and Stella clearly had more. As a designer to rock stars with a
penchant for leather and metal, she had a deep, growly voice and
cheeks so sunken that one blog has dubbed her "Cheroin."
Jerry was homely, too, but not in an interesting way, with his
chubby face, short hair, and a dress code of unadorned T-shirts.
He was cocky but not deservedly so. He was neither a sure
contender nor a brewing troublemaker. And if producers had a
say—which they usually do—they probably asked that he be
auf'd.
Jerry sneered at everyone else's clothes, but even his snootiness
lacked character. "Crap on top of crap" was his idea of an insult,
but this show thrives on more colorful critiques: One contestant
said Jerry's outfit belonged on an ax murderer, while judge
Michael Kors compared it to "a handiwipe gone wrong." In
interviews, Jerry has since said he wishes he'd unleashed more
caustic stuff. It's a lesson too many contestants learn too late.
Lesson 4: Nobody likes a loner.
Nimma entered Bravo's Top Chef Chicago last spring with an
impressive work ethic, a professed love of cooking, and a
steadfast refusal to have fun. Some people deal with pressure by
drinking or picking fights. Nimma just wanted to be left alone.
That's a fairly common pitfall for reality contestants, Krasnow
says. On the set of his shows, he hunts down people who are
sitting alone and urges them to mingle. Even talent-based reality
shows draw their drama from relationships. And with no
computers, TV sets, or other outside distractions, Krasnow says,
contestants have no excuse for isolation. "It's like being Amish,"
he tells them. "You're actually going to interact with people."
Lesson 2: Nice guys finish last. Same with nice ladies.
Before reality TV became the force it is today, before everyone
understood how cutthroat these games could be, there was CBS's
Survivor, and there was Sonja. In the show's first-ever season, in
the long-lost summer of 2000, she was the first to have her torch
snuffed out on the island of Pulau Tiga.
If Nimma got a pep talk to this effect, she didn't heed it. Morose
after making a substandard deep-dish pizza in the show's first
challenge, she went to bed while her fellow chefs popped
champagne, drank beer, and goofed off. Yet it was Nimma who
looked foolish in the end. Even with all of that rest, she still
oversalted her shrimp scampi the next day. Before long, she was
sleeping back at home.
At first glance, Sonja seemed a lovely addition to the mix of
islanders: an artsy senior citizen who played the ukulele, she had
a bright view of human nature and, unlike some of her
playmates, was genuinely nice. Sure, she had a fateful stumble
during the first immunity challenge, but her true vulnerability
ran deeper. This was an island of snakes and rats, and Sonja's
guileless personality made her seem impossibly weak. In a scene
midway through the first episode, Sonja played a cheerful ditty
called "Bye-Bye Blues" for eventual winner Richard Hatch. He
applauded her gamely—he probably even meant it—but you
know what he was thinking: bull's-eye.
Lesson 5: Don't clam up.
On America's Next Top Model, the vaudevillian CW contest, it's
especially hard to break through the crowd. When everyone is
young, tall, and beautiful, you've got to be intriguing from the
get-go. The finalists in last spring's Cycle 10 were a typical mix
of larger-than-life ladies, from the combative survivor of female
circumcision to the not-quite-reformed graduate of angermanagement school. And then there was someone named
Atalya, who managed to make little impression whatsoever. In
one scene, she managed to be outshone by a trio of homeless
people.
Lesson 3: Don't be chicken.
Reality contestants have learned from Sonja's mistakes; these
days, most seem to arrive on set with hackles raised. Yet a few
still seem shockingly naive about the demands of the contest at
hand. Sonja, at least, was game for the rigors of life on a desert
island. Sometimes, a reality contestant signs up for adventure but
winds up looking sorry she didn't stay home. Take Stephanie, the
first woman cut from the CW dating show Farmer Wants a Wife.
Throughout the casting process, Atalya seemed a winner, says
Top Model casting director Michelle Mock. She was beautiful,
outspoken, and positive, Mock says. But sometimes, contestants
arrive on the set, get an eyeful of the competition, and instantly
clam up: "It's kind of like fight or flight."
Among the city girls in heels who hoped to win a farmer's heart,
Stephanie was the most squeamish about country life. Tasked in
the first episode with putting chickens into pens, she was
reluctant to grab the poultry. Farmer Matt wasn't charmed, and
the producers probably weren't, either. Why bother coming to
rural Missouri if you're not willing to get down and dirty on the
farm? The show's humor derived from the contrast between city
and country life, and to play up the divide, the women had to be
willing to embarrass themselves. Most of Stephanie's
competitors were squeamish, too, but they ran eagerly after the
birds, throwing caution—and fear of chicken-poop stains—to
the wind.
Mock is surprised at how many contestants succumb to
intimidation, especially if they spot another model with a similar
look. But with so little time to break through the clutter, no one
has the luxury of opening-night jitters.
Lesson 6: Know your eliminator.
On a reality show, it's almost always good to be memorable. But
if your fate is in a single person's hands, you'd better be indelible
for the right reasons. On the premiere of the 11 th season of
ABC's The Bachelor, Texan millionaire Brad Womack met his
25 potential brides at a cocktail party and was charged with
winnowing the field to 15 by morning. The challenge was to
make a strong impression amid a Top Model-type field: Each
contestant was equally doe-eyed, flirtatious, and overly made-
up. And as the alcohol flowed and the time ticked away, the
women grew increasingly desperate for Brad's attention.
One woman, trained in Chinese medicine, performed a reading
of her would-be suitor's tongue. One twisted herself into a
human pretzel. One changed into a bikini and dove into a pool.
And one determined brunette named Morgan made herself
especially memorable. She announced that she was pulling out
her "signature move," then took off her shoes and showed Brad a
pair of webbed feet. She got him to react, all right. But she didn't
get a rose.
ABC reality show called Fat March, had honed her beeyotch
skills to fine precision. And she seemed to appreciate the VH1
mentality. In this clip, fighting for survival before the judges, she
delivers a stirring monologue about the failures of her
teammates. The judge named Capricorn was clearly impressed—
and she and her fellow panelists couldn't help but let Kim stay.
Lesson 7: No, seriously: Know your eliminator.
Sometimes, a grating personality can take you far; how else to
explain the legendary Omarosa? Still, to last on a show with an
opinionated judge, you have to follow certain rules. Martin, the
first person cut from NBC's The Apprentice: Los Angeles, spoke
in aphorisms ("A new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom
knows the corners") and was the last one picked when his castmates split into teams. He was conflict in pinstripes, and the
producers probably loved him.
Lesson 9: Everyone loves a comeback story.
The Project Runway producers surely passed the champagne
several times after that first, fateful week of Season 5. Stella
lasted through eight more episodes, redeeming her false start
with a series of interesting designs: Her black leather Olympic
parade outfit would have looked a lot smarter than the blazers
Ralph Lauren sent down the Beijing track. Better yet, she
became one of the season's most intriguing characters,
expounding on the virtues of leather, pounding fabrics with a
hammer in the workroom, and rolling her eyes like an
overworked nursery-school teacher if anyone complained. "Who
knows how a personality is going to develop?" says Mock, the
Top Model casting director. "Who they are on Episode 1 is
definitely not who they are at the end."
But the decision-making lay with Donald Trump, who knows the
qualities he wants in an employee. And when it comes to
judging, reality producers don't always get their way. On the set
of The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency, Krasnow says, he
often begs his star to keep contestants in. "She tends to get fed
up and wants to get rid of somebody because they're annoying
her," he says, "whereas we like that they're annoying and want to
keep them around."
By the time she was eliminated earlier this month, Stella was
acting as if the show had outlived its usefulness to her. "I think
my ego was way too big to be here anyway," she said cheerfully,
after accepting Heidi Klum's auf Wiedersehen kiss. Though she
won't be the winner, Stella will be remembered as one of this
season's stars. A bad first episode doesn't mean a contestant can't
make a comeback. But if you want a shot at post-reality fame,
you first have to make it past Week 1.
Martin seems to have signed his own pink slip by breaking a
basic law of Trumpdom: Look overeager at all times. In the first
boardroom session of the season, the Donald and daughter
Ivanka questioned whether Martin would fit into their corporate
culture. They challenged his claim that he had worked suitably
hard. And they chastised him for committing a mortal sin—
asking to use the bathroom when he should have been sticking to
business.
Lesson 8: Know your demographic.
In order to make a hateable personality work, you have to know
your eliminator, but you also have to understand your
demographic. Take Kim, from VH1's Apprentice knockoff, I
Want To Work for Diddy. She swooped onto the show like a
wildly overcaffeinated diva and survived two close calls in the
first episode alone. First, the judges nearly knocked her out—or
pretended to, at least—for her strange opening presentation, in
which she dubbed herself "Poprah." (She said it stood for
"perfect personal assistant.") Later, after enduring her nonstop
insults, her cast-mates begged the judges to send Kim home.
But VH1 understands the ratings power of the loudmouth; who
among the channel's viewers wouldn't want to watch a plus-sized
Omarosa gone ghetto? Kim, who had already done a turn on an
day to day
Poll Vaulting
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 4:47 PM ET
Friday, Sept. 19, 2008
Politics: Why NPR and ABC Presidential Polls Contradict
Each Other
New polls show the presidential race tightening. A Washington
Post/ABC News poll has Obama leading by single digits. But an
NPR poll shows that McCain is leading by two points.
"We have to take all numbers with a huge grain of salt," chief
political correspondent John Dickerson tells Alex Chadwick. He
reads between the numbers and discusses whether we can expect
a "historic debate moment." Listen to the segment.
What's Up, Doc?: Med School Tied to Suicidal Thoughts
A new study shows that about half of all medical students suffer
from burnout, and one in 10 has suicidal thoughts. Madeleine
Brand speaks with medical contributor Dr. Sydney Spiesel about
what's behind these figures. Listen to the segment.
endure it. I have a hard time seeing where this relationship is
headed—it already sounds like a Cannibal Corpse.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: Trysting in My Sleep
dear prudence
My Bloody Valentine
Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend is absolutely not a sadistic sex killer. He is a kind
and generally considerate person. But he loves listening to
gruesome death metal—music best described as blasting noise
with deranged growls and shrieks that often (from what I can
tell) celebrates horrendous misogynistic violence. He respects
that I am not a fan of this music and doesn't usually play it when
I am around. But he gets a huge charge from listening to it when
we have sex and is comparatively lackluster at the deed when he
doesn't have it to fire him up. Although I find the music
unpleasant and distracting, I don't object when I feel focused
enough to block it out. What really bothers me are the awful
themes. It disturbs me that a seemingly well-adjusted man in his
30s is aroused by torture fantasies set to music. He says it's just
about the "energy" for him, but I really don't know what to think
about someone who wants to listen to Cannibal Corpse when he
makes love to me. Am I being oversensitive about this?
Dear Prudence,
My husband and I have a wonderful daughter. She is kind,
funny, articulate, and intelligent. Extremely intelligent. She
began speaking in complete sentences before she was 1 and
reading when she was 3. She just turned 4. Our problem is that
other parents in our social circle seem a bit intimidated by her.
Their children are sweet kids, too, but not at the same
developmental level as she is. They say things like, "Wow, your
daughter just read that sign to me. Little Timmy can't even talk
normally. What's wrong with him?" or "My goodness, we are
behind! Your daughter is reading, and our kid isn't even potty
trained!" It embarrasses us. Yes, she is advanced, but she is still
a normal kid. More importantly, there is nothing wrong with
their kids! My sister-in-law and her husband are the worst with
insulting their own child when they compare our kids. My first
instinct is to stick up for their children because it bothers me so
much that their parents are insulting them or thinking there is
something wrong with them. But when I say something like,
"Don't say that. Timmy is a great kid!" this seems to offend the
parents. When I say, "Everyone plateaus at the same time," that
seems wrong, too. I worry that this comparison behavior will
alienate my daughter from her peer group. One family has
already begun to avoid us, and our daughter noticed right away.
What should I say instead so the parents quit focusing on this
and start appreciating how much fun the kids have together?
—Blasted
—My Kid Is Normal
Dear Blasted,
It's always a comfort to know the person you love is not a
sadistic sex killer—so right there you have something to build
on. I like the image of you two making love: He's cranking up
Cannibal Corpse's romantic classic "Bloody Chunks" while
you're sticking in the ear buds of your iPod and desperately
turning up the volume on Michael Bublé's version of "I've Got
You Under My Skin." When you're not having sex, you say he's
"generally considerate," which is not exactly a declaration that
"I've got you under my skin/ I've got you deep in the heart of me/
So deep in my heart, that you're really a part of me." But couples
need to have sex, and he finds it hard to perform unless you are
forced to listen to songs of female dismemberment. As you
describe it, you get through these sessions by trying to
disassociate yourself from what is going on. This does not sound
like a formula for sustained intimacy. I don't think you're being
oversensitive about the gruesome nature of your boyfriend's
favorite erotic imagery, especially since you are supposed to
Dear My Kid,
Those first years of parenthood in particular can set off a
competitive genetic gong. Many new parents are looking for
signs that—despite their own obvious limitations—they've
somehow produced a chromosomal champion. So they try to see
genius at work when their little one swims in the toilet or eats
out of the dog's bowl. And then they go for a play date, and
there's your toddler reciting the Gettysburg Address and working
out quadratic equations on her Magna Doodle. It's deflating.
Fortunately, time will take care of much of their resentment as
their kids gain bladder control and become intelligible and
literate. Of course, some parents (hockey moms, chess dads,
members of Skull and Bones?) never let go of their competitive
instincts about their kids. But as the children get older, most
parents tend to be able to see them for who they are and worry
less about how they stack up. For right now, when other parents
make comparisons, you can shrug and say, "She is precocious in
some ways. But we're just happy she's a good kid." When they
observe how dopey their children seem, you can laugh it off as if
they were making a joke, then add, "I'm so crazy about your
How do I convince my boyfriend that death metal is not mood music?
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 6:57 AM ET
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Timmy!" And for your own pleasure, keep good notes in your
baby book about your extraordinary daughter.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I am 55. I married when I was 20, had two children, and
divorced after 16 years of an abusive marriage. A few years
later, I fell in love. That relationship ended after more than 10
years of makeups, breakups, and turmoil. I have now been
involved with a man for the last two years. He's in his 60s. I am
not in love. However, the relationship is easy and without drama.
We spend every weekend together and do things that I never did
in my entire life. I enjoy our time together but have no intention
of marrying this man or living with him. I feel that there may be
someone else out there, someone I can fall in love with. Any
ideas?
—Not in Love
Dear Not,
If you look back on when you were in love, those relationships
tended to be stimulating but rotten. Maybe you are actually
confusing thrills with love. Yes, it's wonderful to be in an
exciting relationship, but not if the excitement is of the "Is he
going to punch me in the jaw?" or "Is he going to break up with
me tomorrow?" variety. What you describe as "not in love"
would sound to an awful lot of people like love. You simply
enjoy being together, you make each other feel safe and
contented, you are experiencing the world in a new way. If that's
not love, it sure is lovely. Yet you are dissatisfied—though you
don't enumerate why. If it's because you think of love as a
rollercoaster, maybe you should start appreciating the pleasures
of a placid ride in a rowboat.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend and I recently moved into the first floor of a twofamily house. Because we're both nesters and because we're
getting a puppy in a couple of weeks, we eagerly cleaned up the
backyard, which had clearly not been tended to in a couple of
years—beer cans, trash, hip-high weeds, invasive vines, gutters
clogged with cigarette butts, you name it. We ended up with a
dozen 30-gallon bags full of waste, from a yard that is no bigger
than your average dorm room. About a week after this massive
cleanup, before we'd had a chance to plant anything, we
discovered that—once again—the backyard was polluted. This
time, littered with yet more cigarette butts. Our upstairs
neighbors have a porch that overlooks the yard, and it seems that
they threw the butts over the edge. I'm all for giving them an
ashtray as a housewarming gift, but my boyfriend thinks that
might be too direct. What's the best way to handle this?
—Nest-Featherer
Dear Nest,
Ah, smokers—the world is their ashtray! Besides inflicting their
foul habit on those nearby, they are the last remaining people
who believe that if they have a piece of refuse in their hands, the
proper way to get rid of it is to toss it in the street. Your idea to
give them an ashtray will surely be interpreted as a hostile
gesture. You could go up there with a nongermane gift—a jar of
nice jam—and say you've been meaning to introduce yourselves.
Then, at the end of the introduction, mention that you hope they
enjoy the new look of the backyard, explain you're planning to
do some landscaping, and you wonder if they could dispose of
their cigarette butts elsewhere. This will likely make them want
to stub out their cigarettes on your bare flesh. (Have you ever
noticed smokers tend to be a little hostile about their habit?)
Since you're planning on getting a puppy, you will be picking up
plenty of unpleasant stuff out in the yard, so if the filters rain
down again, just think of them as something else you have to
scoop.
—Prudie
diary
Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of
Jordan
Lance Armstrong knows who I am—he even knows I'm a runner!
By Rania Al Abdullah
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 11:30 AM ET
From: Rania Al Abdullah
Subject: New York Is a Great Place To Have Jetlag
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 2:28 PM ET
The great thing about having jetlag in New York is that I'm up so
early I get the best of the morning—the crisp, fresh, sunny starts
that make you feel like you can take on the day ahead with
gusto. And although I've been here many times before, the city's
really buzzing right now: There are huddles of security guards in
black suits everywhere, frazzled staffers hanging around hotel
lobbies, and convoys causing traffic jams. Can't help but wonder
if the average New Yorker is counting the hours until the U.N.
General Assembly and everything else that's happening around it
are over so they can get their city back.
So, I'm in NY this week wearing a couple of hats, shining a
spotlight on the Millennium Development Goals and talking
about the need for more sustainable development that will not
only safeguard the environment, but also provide opportunity for
the disenfranchised in society. It's something we're very
interested in, in the Arab world.
I was invited to speak at Condé Nast Traveler's World Savers
Congress conference amid the awesome and inspiring
architecture of Gotham Hall. It was about the power of tourism
to nurture our planet's precious resources while providing lasting
economic opportunities for local communities.
I was there talking up the Middle East—not a region in conflict
and turmoil, as many think, but a mosaic of cultures, stories,
traditions, and warm, welcoming people.
So, there I was, psyching myself up backstage to speak, because
no matter how often I do this, I still get nervous and have to steel
myself.
Onstage, the beautiful, eloquent, and confident Ashley Judd was
talking passionately about the work she's been doing to alleviate
health problems in the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Rwanda. All the time she was talking, there was a woman
onstage next to her stirring, stirring, stirring this huge jug of
what looked like dirty, muddy water. Turns out it was dirty,
muddy water that was being sanitized by a little sachet of PUR
crystals that disinfect and purify water, prevent waterborne
illnesses, and save lives. And she drank it there and then to
prove to us all how safe it was. I hope she feels fine in the
morning!
When I was driving to my next event, I watched swaths of NY's
bright young women, suited, booted, and striding purposefully to
work, to meetings, to lunches, and it made me think about a
meeting I had yesterday with the executive director of UNICEF,
Ms. Ann Veneman, and several members of her team. We talked
about the 38 million girls around the world not in school, the
girls not counted on birth registers, the girls enrolled in school
but unable to attend because they have to collect water for their
families, the lost girls. We talked about how UNICEF and other
international organizations are trying to find them, give them a
voice, make them count, and give them tools to change the
course of their lives.
Research shows that girls who go to school become women who
spend more of the family resources on child nutrition, health,
and education—so children grow up with better chances and
choices. Educating girls is one of the highest-returning social
investments we can make. And we're not making it. That's why
I'm proud to be working with UNICEF on this and other
education-related issues. It's too important to ignore.
And then it was time to check in on my kids, back from school
and having iftar with their grandparents. Of course, their news
was less about missing their mom, what happened in school, and
homework than it is about what toys, gadgets, and music I
should be buying for them. You'd think that was my sole
purpose for being in NY! I cautioned restraint, tried to manage
expectations, and then panicked about where I could possibly get
a microscope for examining insects, which is what seems very
important for my 7-year-old right now. I so preferred the Barbie
period!
My husband told me that Hashem, my 3-year-old, has been
coughing all night and has a temperature, and my stomach
lurched with guilt for not being there to cuddle and soothe him.
Why do they always get sick when I'm away? It kills me. I
consoled myself with the thought that we'd all be together at the
weekend—an extra-special one because of both my daughters'
birthday parties.
Midafternoon, I was full of good intentions to go for a walk and
shake off the crashing fatigue, so I went back to the hotel. An
hour later, one of my staff texted, reminding me of tomorrow's
commitments, pricking my conscience, and so I got out my
briefing papers.
Later in the evening, I had the honor of meeting a superhero in
the field of development, someone I've always wanted to meet.
Hectic as traveling for work is, meeting people like Dr. Fazle
Abed, founder of BRAC, makes it so worthwhile. He's so
humble, soft-spoken, and down to earth, you would never guess
he'd touched the lives of millions of people in Bangladesh and
beyond. If this is what one man can do to help the less fortunate,
imagine what our combined strength could achieve. People like
him fill me with hope.
From: Rania Al Abdullah
Subject: Backstage at the Clinton Global Initiative
Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 11:30 AM ET
Woke up this morning, and the first thing I did was phone my
son Hashem to see how he was feeling. He was napping, and I
didn't get much out of him, but it was still comforting to hear his
sleepy little voice. I can't wait to give him a big cuddle.
And with that, I headed off to the Clinton Global Initiative for
the opening session, which focused on education, health,
poverty, and climate. And what a lineup: President Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, former Vice President Al Gore,
Bono, Coca-Cola Chairman Neville Isdell, Lance Armstrong,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, plus, of course, the charismatic and
charming President Clinton. A pretty dazzling panel.
Backstage in the holding room, we chatted about everything
from the progress on the MDG and the challenges of the
financial crisis, to Deerfield Academy (my husband's alma
mater), and President Clinton's appearance on The Daily Show.
A few months ago, I came across this poignant and
heartbreaking poem, by Marie-Therese Feuerstein, which I felt
compelled to share.
"Maternal Mortality"
It was a nice surprise to meet Lance Armstrong. Not only was I
taken aback that he knew who I was—he even knew I was a
runner. We exchanged notes on the joys and aches of running—
something I'm looking forward to getting back to next week at
home.
So much was said on the panel. What a learning experience. I
could spend hours writing about it—there were so many
interesting ideas and experiences shared. So much passion.
And it's that combination of passion, focus, creativity, risktaking, and a sprinkle of fun that sums up my good friend Bono.
He kicked off his remarks with a simple question, which I
paraphrase: If the United States alone can find $700 billion to
save Wall Street, why can't the world find $25 billion to save
20,000 children who die each day? Makes you think, doesn't it?
As for Al Gore, I admired him before for his advocacy for the
environment and the impact of climate change, but after talking
with him and listening to him, I could understand why he has
convinced so many people to change their ways and make new
lifestyle choices. I promised myself to do more and to find ways
to try harder. That's the kind of effect he has!
The session topics included public-private partnerships in
education, something that is taking off in Jordan. I talked about
Madrasati, a project I started in April back home. It aims to
rejuvenate 500 of our most rundown schools. We've done 100
now, and the looks on the children's faces when I visit their
classrooms make it so worthwhile.
And just when jetlag started to kick in, so did the rest of my
schedule, with three back-to-back events.
It was an honor to introduce Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at
an event to celebrate progress made on the MDG, but he also
cautioned about the huge amount of work, partnerships, focus,
and finances needed to ensure that we meet the 2015 deadline.
I co-hosted a dinner to help shine a global spotlight on the issue
of maternal health with Wendi Murdoch and Sarah Brown, who
support the wonderful work of the White Ribbon Alliance.
The statistics are staggering: Every minute, a woman dies in
childbirth, and for every one that dies, 30 more suffer
complications. If you're a woman giving birth in Sierra Leone,
you have a 1-in-8 chance of dying. In 2008, these numbers are
just wrong. But, sadly, they're correct.
People don't really understand
How women die in childbirth
The details
Are almost
Unimaginable
The living foetus
Striving for life
Fighting to be born.
The life-going sanctuary
Of the uterus
Becomes the prison,
The tomb.
Or the mother,
Weak from the pain
Of delivery
Finds nothing
Seems able to quell
The gushing of her blood.
There are no more cloths
To absorb the flow,
And only two more hours
To her life.
If we cannot improve
The quality of women's lives
At least improve
The quality of their deaths …
How can we "sell"
Maternal mortality?
This human tragedy
is not available
On video.
Anyway
It is a "taboo" subject
Linked
With human sexuality
Which is already
A taboo subject.
Unfortunately,
No-one has interviewed
The dying woman.
We don't know
What she would have to say
To us.
Perhaps
Someone should interview
The children
Whose mothers have died.
They may well wonder
Why their mothers
Had to be pregnant again
In the first place.
It is difficult to sell
A commodity
That is too common.
Anyway, dying is a familiar occupation.
"Why should we
Get excited about maternal deaths?
There are so many other kinds!"
Perhaps we have to sell
Maternal mortality
More as a fin-de-siècle
Phenomenon.
The question is,
Does maternal mortality matter?
If it doesn't,
Perhaps we should approach, with caution,
Entry into a century
Where women will go on dying
In increasing numbers
And where …
It still won't matter.
dvd extras
Mad Women
Revisiting 9 to 5.
By Megan Hustad
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 11:23 AM ET
Last Saturday, 9 to 5: The Musical opened in Los Angeles in
preparation for its Broadway debut in April 2009. The show was
initially slotted for 2007, and yet that theater season came and
went with no 9 to 5 and no good explanation for the delay.
Perhaps producers had trouble finding suitable stand-ins for
original movie co-stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly
Parton. Finding actresses that can sing and sympathetically
describe mounting a man's severed head above the office
credenza would be a challenge for any casting director.
Making the decision to retain the film's 1980 setting must have
been easier. While audiences can be grateful they won't be asked
to endure awkward jokes about BlackBerrys or Bangalore, this
choice raises another question: Will a 30-year-old comedy about
sexism in the workplace feel as period as Mad Men? Has
consciousness raising turned into camp? The DVD of 9 to 5,
released most recently in a "Sexist, Egotistical, Lying,
Hypocritical Bigot Edition," offers a chance to see how far we
have—and haven't—come.
Fonda and producer Bruce Gilbert designed 9 to 5 to be a
statement film about a problem that everyone now knows as
sexual harassment. "It was just normal," Fonda explains in the
DVD commentary. "Nobody talked about it." Eager to break that
silence, she and Gilbert interviewed working women about their
everyday experiences on the job, and they discovered that "just
normal" included more-than-indecent proposals and X-rated
quid pro quos. Normal was a boss who passed off your ideas as
his own; normal was losing a promotion to a man you'd trained;
normal was a barely contained, ever-simmering anger.
The duo presented their findings to screenwriter Colin Higgins,
told him who his leads would be—Fonda had already signed up
Tomlin and Parton—and asked him to make something of it.
Higgins set the script at the blandly ominous Consolidated
Companies, an every-office where pantyhose-clad knees are
forever one distracted moment away from slamming into the
sharp corner of a file drawer. Dropped ceilings and brushed gray
aluminum have rarely communicated so much back story.
Yet it's the psychic strains of the job that dwarf all others.
Longtime office manager Violet Newstead (Tomlin) is
competence personified, but when she presses boss Franklin
Hart Jr.—played by Dabney Coleman and his hips—for a longoverdue promotion, she's told to shush. Doralee Rhodes is Hart's
secretary, played by first-time actress Parton. Unbeknownst to
good-natured Doralee, the whole office believes she's Hart's
mistress. The source of these rumors? Hart. Judy Bernly (Fonda)
is less aggrieved for her own sake than for her co-workers'.
When she witnesses a colleague get summarily fired for a small
infraction, she immediately rustles over to protest. (The woman
demures, "That's OK, Judy. I wanted to spend more time with
my kids anyway.")
The three women discover common cause one night over drinks
at a bar and, later, over a joint in Doralee's chintz-choked living
room. What, they ask themselves, would they like to do to the
boss? Elaborate fantasy sequences ensue. Judy puts on a cowgirl
outfit, chases Hart around the office with a shotgun, and blows
him away as he cowers on the toilet. Doralee, also mysteriously
in Western gear, assumes the boss's job and subjects Hart—now
her secretary—to a bitter taste of his own medicine. ("You've got
a nice ass, Frank! But, you know, you oughta get your pants cut
a little tighter; you need to bring 'em up just a little in the
crotch.")
Vincent Canby panned the film in the New York Times for
"waving the flag of feminism as earnestly as Russian farmers
used to wave the hammer-and-sickle at the end of movies about
collective farming." But moviegoers seemed to love it. 9 to 5
was the No. 2 box office draw of 1980, second only to The
Empire Strikes Back. The movie's eponymous theme song—
written and performed by Parton—topped the Billboard singles
chart and quickly became, in Fonda's words, "a movement
anthem." Even the daffy fantasy sequences were a hit, reportedly
drawing approving whoops and hollers at special screenings for
administrative assistants and other clerical workers.
Canby saw the movie as a "militant cry for freedom." Yet it
likely wouldn't have enjoyed nearly as much popularity had the
film's message not come nestled—much like Coleman's head in
one memorable scene—in the zaftig cushion of Parton's breasts.
If American ticket buyers preferred their freedom fighters
gussied up like Annie Oakley trolling for a date, well, so be it.
And if they preferred farce to drama, that was fine, too. The dour
Norma Rae, which was released the previous year, received
critical acclaim but had a harder time finding an audience, doing
roughly one-fifth of 9 to 5's business. Comedy, Fonda suggests
on the commentary track, was the spoonful of sugar that helped
the political theater go down.
Just how do you enact equity and justice in the workplace? Well,
if you were to follow 9 to 5's script, you'd kick off your
organizing efforts by (mistakenly) assuming you'd killed the
boss in an accident involving a box of Skinny & Sweet artificial
sweetener. You'd then steal his body from the hospital (to foil
homicide investigators), realize that you've got the wrong body
in the trunk of your car, discover the boss isn't actually dead, that
he plans on reporting your (alleged) plot to kill him to the police
… and, well, you can see we've strayed far from EEOC
procedure here.
Judy spends the rest of the film in a nightgown baby-sitting
Hart—now being held prisoner in his own home, strung up from
the ceiling in a harness made of S&M gear and a garage-door
opener. Meanwhile, back at the Consolidated offices, Violet and
Doralee use his extended absence to implement a slate of
reforms: equal pay for equal work, on-site day care, job-sharing,
and flextime.
That such progress is achieved only through highly implausible
shenanigans is a disappointment: It's precisely when the film
turns its attention to how the office might be made more
responsive to women's needs that it loses its nerve. Yet what's
bound to strike anybody watching the film now is how
progressive those policy recommendations sound even by
today's standards. While women are no longer de facto coffeefetchers, flextime and on-site day care remain exceptions
enjoyed by a lucky few.
Given how much work remains to be done before 9 to 5's
fictional reforms become the new "just normal," it's surprising
how comparatively toothless many of today's workplace
comedies are. Catch NBC's The Office, the movie Office Space,
or read Scott Adams, and you might imagine that the worst thing
that can happen to you at work is boredom. A satire about fax
machines being so darn slow is hardly taking political risks. The
persistent theme of The Office is that only loser employees
invest in their jobs. The smart ones pretend they're not there.
It will be interesting to see whether 9 to 5's activist side will
survive its transition to Broadway or whether its producers will
worry that even in 2008 such anarchic energy needs to be dolled
up to fill seats. But much of the material is timeless. One line
from the film seems ready-made for an underhand toss to a
packed Saturday-night house. "Couldn't we all just get together
and complain?" Judy wails that first night at the bar. Of course
not, as any 10-year-old sitting in the audience will understand.
Dumb jerks in positions of power don't tend to budge in the face
of mere griping.
Indeed, producer Bruce Gilbert ventures on the commentary that
Franklin Hart Jr. stands in for any unscrupulous authority figure,
which might be why the film was such a success, and not just
with put-upon admins. Everyone could appreciate the itch to
resort to strong-arm tactics, and everyone could cheer an
egotistical, lying hypocrite's downfall. Gilbert's analysis of why
men embraced a film that sought to upend the status quo is
chewed on for a second. Parton is unconvinced: "I think they just
liked the women."
election scorecard
Battleground Bump
New polls show Obama leading in swing states.
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 3:28 PM ET
explainer
What Does It Mean To Suspend a
Campaign?
Whatever the candidate wants it to mean.
By Jacob Leibenluft
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 6:42 PM ET
John McCain announced Wednesday that he would temporarily
suspend his presidential campaign so he can help negotiate the
bailout package for the financial industry. McCain canceled
campaign events and announced plans to take his advertising off
the air, but his spokespeople have still been appearing on TV,
and he continues to raise money. What does it mean to suspend a
campaign, anyway?
It's up to the candidate. Under election law, the phrase
"suspending a campaign" has no formal meaning. It's used most
frequently by candidates when they drop out of their primary
race. There's a reason for that: If a candidate "ended" his
campaign instead of merely "suspending" it, then he might lose
eligibility for federal matching funds that would help pay off his
debts. The phrase has been employed at least as far back as the
1970s and continues to serve as the most popular way for
candidates to end their primary bids without closing down their
campaign committees.
McCain is not, in fact, the first presidential candidate to take a
hiatus in the middle of a general election campaign. In June
2004, both candidates for president suspended most of their
political activities in the days following Ronald Reagan's death,
although they did not pull their advertising. Ross Perot abruptly
suspended his campaign in July 1992—ostensibly for good—
despite projections that he might win as much as 20 percent of
the vote. Then, on Oct. 1, Perot re-entered the fray, citing those
grass-roots supporters as a motivation.
Perhaps the most dramatic campaign suspension came in 1952,
when Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson interrupted his campaign
less than a week before Election Day to respond to a riot at the
Menard State Prison. Stevenson's advisers reportedly disagreed
with the Democratic nominee's decision, which forced him to
miss planned speeches in Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia,
and New York. According to the New York Times, Stevenson
"followed a force of 321 state troopers and prison guards, armed
with shotguns, machine guns, small arms and billy clubs as they
stormed into a large cell house to end the uprising." The show of
force managed to free seven guards who had been taken hostage
and end the riot. Stevenson had less luck on Election Day, losing
by almost 11 percentage points to Dwight Eisenhower.
It's not the first time McCain has suspended his campaign
activities, either. In 1999, McCain canceled the formal
announcement of his presidential candidacy due to air strikes on
Kosovo, claiming it was not an appropriate time for a political
event. The next year, McCain suspended his campaign in a more
conventional way after Super Tuesday, although campaign
advisers said McCain would consider re-entering the race if
then-Gov. George W. Bush performed particularly poorly in
subsequent primaries.
Bonus Explainer: How does a campaign pull its ads off the air?
By telling the people at the TV stations or cable providers to
stop running them. As the Explainer has noted before, an
advertiser can usually get a spot off the air pretty easily. (For
example, a sales manager at one Cincinnati TV station told the
Explainer that he was able to stop playing McCain's ads in time
for Wednesday's evening news.) But political ad buyers say it
still can take up to 24 hours or so for other stations to change
their advertising logs, and reports abound of McCain ads
running in Florida, Virginia, and elsewhere.
For the ads he does succeed in canceling, McCain probably
won't lose his money; instead, his campaign will receive credits
that can be used for advertising in the future. But just as there
was a slight delay in taking some ads off the air, there could also
be a delay in getting them back on, given the advance notice
stations need to place them in rotation.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Bob Biersack of the Federal Election
Commission, Ondine Fortune of Fortune Media Inc., Paul
Herrnson of the University of Maryland, Paul Ryan of the
Campaign Legal Center, and Evan Tracey of the Campaign
Media Analysis Group.
explainer
No, Really, How Much Is $700 Billion?
About 12 Bill Gateses.
By Juliet Lapidos
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 6:27 PM ET
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson urged Congress Tuesday morning to
authorize a $700 billion bailout of struggling financial
institutions. Although the congressional leadership has indicated
its willingness to get onboard with the plan, rank-and-file
lawmakers from both parties are balking at what's been called
the largest bailout in U.S. history. Just how much is $700
billion?
A lot, or not that much. There are about 300 million men,
women, and children currently living in the United States, so the
bailout is equal to roughly $2,300 per person. That's right around
what we each paid, on average, for gas and oil in 2006 ($2,227)
and a bit less than our average personal tax burden ($2,432).
Stepping away from average Joes, $700 billion is equal to about
12 Bill Gateses. The assembled net worth of the Forbes 400 is
$1.57 trillion, or more than twice the cost of the bailout. Titanic,
one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, raked in $1.8
billion from the worldwide box office, so James Cameron would
have to make roughly 381 Titanic-sized blockbusters to settle
Wall Street's debts. According to the Centers for Disease
Control, the single-year cost of obesity in the United States was
$117 billion in 2000, or about one-sixth the bailout—although
that number has been disputed.
If the federal government siphoned off Florida's gross domestic
product, we could cover the bailout. Invading the Netherlands
might be advisable—that nation's GDP was $768.7 billion last
year. Of course, invasions cost a lot of money. Back in 2003, the
Bush administration told Congress that the Iraq war would cost
between $60 billion and $100 billion, but it's estimated that, so
far, we've spent about $600 billion. Should the Treasury receive
authority from Congress to borrow $700 billion, the national
debt will rise by only about 7 percent. Right now, it's sitting at
$9.6 trillion.
Let's say Slate charged its advertisers $30 per 1,000 ad
impressions, a common industry rate. And let's imagine for a
second that the federal government decided to nationalize Slate
in order to pay for the bailout. We'd need our readers to rack up
enough page views to see 23.3 trillion banner ads before the feds
were satisfied.
For historical perspective, consider that the Marshall Plan, which
helped finance the recovery of Western Europe after World War
II, cost the United States about $13 billion. Of course, in 2008
dollars that's more like $100 billion. And Niall Ferguson has
estimated that as a comparable share of the U.S. GDP, it's more
like $740 billion.
Lastly, in apocalyptic terms, $700 billion really isn't all that
much. If nothing is done to change the way we finance Social
Security, the trust fund reserves will be exhausted by 2041. This
means that, in 75 years, there'll be a shortfall of $4.3 trillion—or
about six bailouts. According to the Stern report (issued by U.K.
economist Sir Nicholas Stern), global climate change could cost
the planet $9 trillion (or 12.86 bailouts) if we don't address the
problem within the next decade or so.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Scott Berridge of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
explainer
Wall Street Suicides
If we're in the midst of a financial collapse, why aren't executives jumping out
of office buildings?
By Nina Shen Rastogi
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET
"This September feels a lot like autumn 1929," read an op-ed
from this Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Several other
publications have made the same comparison: AlterNet asked,
"Are we on the verge of a repeat?" The Daily Mail wondered
what we can learn from events in 1929 to help us "avoid a 21st
Century Great Depression." If things are really as bad as that,
how come we aren't hearing about executives jumping out of
windows?
Because the current situation hasn't had nearly as devastating an
effect on people's personal finances. The Great Crash of 1929—
and, to a lesser extent, the crash of 1987—did lead some people
to commit suicide. But in nearly all of those cases, the deceased
had suffered a major loss when the market collapsed. Now, due
in large part to those earlier experiences, investors tend to keep
their portfolios far more diversified, so as to avoid having their
entire fortunes wiped out when stocks take a downturn. In
addition, some of the worst declines in the past week have been
limited to a smaller number of companies (such as Lehman
Bros., Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs), further limiting the
potential damage to individual investors.
Tall tales about panicked speculators leaping to their deaths have
become part of the popular lore about the Great Crash. But
although jumping from bridges or buildings was the secondmost-popular form of suicide in New York between 1921 and
1931, the "crash-related jumping epidemic" is just a myth.
Between Black Thursday and the end of 1929, only four of the
100 suicides and suicide attempts reported in the New York
Times were plunges linked to the crash, and only two took place
on Wall Street. (There were some crash-related suicides that
didn't involve fatal jumps: The president of County Trust Co.
and the head of Rochester Gas and Electric both killed
themselves, but they used a gun and gas, respectively.)
An urban legend about the suicide outbreak seems to have
sprung up almost instantaneously. On the day after Black
Thursday, the New York Times reported that many "wild and
false" rumors were spreading throughout the country, including
claims that 11 speculators had committed suicide and that a
crowd had gathered around a Wall Street building because they
thought a workman was a speculator preparing to jump. That
same day, Will Rogers quipped that "you had to stand in line to
get a window to jump out of"; and soon Eddie Cantor was joking
that hotel clerks were asking guests if they wanted rooms "for
sleeping or jumping." By mid-November, New York's chief
medical examiner tried to put the kibosh on the rumor by
publicly announcing that there had been fewer suicides between
Oct. 15 and Nov. 13 than there had been in the same period the
year before. (Winston Churchill—himself a major stock-market
investor—may have added to the rumor mill: He was in New
York during the crash and, in a December 1929 Daily Telegraph
article, recalled how, under his own hotel window, "a gentleman
cast himself down fifteen storey and was dashed to pieces.")
The two Wall Street leaps that did take place, however, were
dramatic enough to sustain the myth. On Nov. 5, Hulda
Borowski, a clerk who'd been working at a Wall Street stock
brokerage house for 28 years, leapt off a 40-story building. On
Nov. 16, three days after the market had taken another dive, G.E.
Cutler, the head of a produce firm, climbed onto the ledge of his
lawyer's office. The New York Times reported that an attorney
struggled to pull the frantic Cutler inside, to no avail:
For a moment the men fell apart, then Mr.
Cutler lunged over the edge. [The attorney]
seized the tails of his coat, but his grip broke.
Cutler's body crashed on to an automobile with
New Jersey license plates parked near the
junction of Wall, Pearl and Beaver Streets, and
bounded to the pavement.
In the week following the 1987 stock-market crash, at least two
suicides in the United States were linked to the crisis, but none
involved a window plunge. (One of the incidents was a murdersuicide in which a distraught investor in Miami killed a Merrill
Lynch executive and then himself.) There were also rumors that
the Pacific Stock Exchange had asked Golden Gate Bridge
officials to be on alert for jumpers, but the stock exchange
denied the claim.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks James Ledbetter of The Big Money and reader
Brian Boddy for asking the question.
family
Spare the Rod
Why you shouldn't hit your kids.
By Alan E. Kazdin
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 7:09 AM ET
The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn't
pause to wonder: "What does science have to say about the
efficacy of corporal punishment?" If they are thinking anything
at all, it's: "Here comes justice!" And while the typical parent
may not know or care, the science on corporal punishment of
kids is pretty clear. Despite the rise of the timeout and other
nonphysical forms of punishment, most American parents hit,
pinch, shake, or otherwise lay violent hands on their youngsters:
63 percent of parents physically discipline their 1- to 2-yearolds, and 85 percent of adolescents have been physically
punished by their parents. Parents cite children's aggression and
failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for
hitting them.
The science also shows that corporal punishment is like
smoking: It's a rare human being who can refrain from stepping
up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and
harmful one. Three cigarettes a month won't hurt you much, and
a little smack on the behind once a month won't harm your child.
But who smokes three cigarettes a month? To call corporal
punishment addictive would be imprecise, but there's a strong
natural tendency to escalate the frequency and severity of
punishment. More than one-third of all parents who start out
with relatively mild punishments end up crossing the line drawn
by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an object, harsh
and cruel hitting, and so on. Children, endowed with wonderful
flexibility and ability to learn, typically adapt to punishment
faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage a little
hitting to lead to a lot of hitting. And, like frequent smoking,
frequent corporal punishment has serious, well-proven bad
effects.
The negative effects on children include increased aggression
and noncompliance—the very misbehaviors that most often
inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic
achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and
increased risk of a mental-health problem (depression or anxiety,
for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also
associated with problems that crop up later in life, including
diminished ability to control one's impulses and poor physicalhealth outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory
disease). Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents'
aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding that physical
punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing
behavior.
But parents keep on hitting. Why? The key is corporal
punishment's temporary effectiveness in stopping a behavior. It
does work—for a moment, anyway. The direct experience of
that momentary pause in misbehavior has a powerful effect,
conditioning the parent to hit again next time to achieve that jolt
of fleeting success and blinding the parent to the long-term
failure of hitting to improve behavior. The research consistently
shows that the unwanted behavior will return at the same rate as
before. But parents believe that corporal punishment works, and
they are further encouraged in that belief by feeling that they
have a right and even a duty to punish as harshly as necessary.
Part of the problem is that most of us pay, at best, selective
attention to science—and scientists, for their part, have not done
a good job of publicizing what they know about corporal
punishment. Studies of parents have demonstrated that if they
are predisposed not to see a problem in the way they rear their
children, then they tend to dismiss any scientific finding
suggesting that this presumed nonproblem is, in fact, a problem.
In other words, if parents believe that hitting is an effective way
to control children's behavior, and especially if that conviction is
backed up by a strong moral, religious, or other cultural rationale
for corporal punishment, they will confidently throw out any
scientific findings that don't comport with their sense of their
own experience.
The catch is that we frequently misperceive our own experience.
Studies of parents' perceptions of child rearing, in particular,
show that memory is an extremely unreliable guide in judging
the efficacy of punishment. Those who believe in corporal
punishment tend to remember that hitting a child worked: She
talked back to me, I slapped her face, she shut her mouth. But
they tend to forget that, after the brief pause brought on by
having her face slapped, the child talked back again, and the
talking back grew nastier and more frequent over time as the
slaps grew harder.
(similar to successful efforts in this country to change attitudes
toward littering and smoking), they do have measurable good
effects. So far, the results suggest that after the ban is passed,
parents hit less and are less favorably inclined toward physical
discipline, and the country is not overwhelmed by a wave of
brattiness and delinquency. The opposite, in fact. If anything, the
results tell us that there's less deviant child behavior.
So what's the case for not hitting? It can be argued from the
science: Physical discipline doesn't work over the long run, it has
bad side effects, and mild punishment often becomes more
severe over time. Opponents of corporal punishment also
advance moral and legal arguments. If you hit another adult you
can be arrested and sued, after all, so shouldn't our smallest,
weakest citizens have a right to equal or even more-than-equal
protection under the law? In this country, if you do the same
thing to your dog that you do to your child, you're more likely to
get in trouble for mistreating the dog.
There could conceivably be good reasons for Americans to
decide, after careful consideration, that our commitment to the
privacy and individual rights of parents is too strong to allow for
an enforceable comprehensive ban on corporal punishment. But
we don't seem to be ready to join much of the rest of the world in
even having a serious discussion about such a ban. In the
overheated climate of nondebate encouraged by those who
would have us believe that we are embroiled in an ongoing highstakes culture war, we mostly just declaim our fixed opinions at
one another.
The combination of scientific and moral/legal arguments has
been effective in debates about discipline in public schools.
Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have banned
corporal punishment in the schools. But so far, we have shown
ourselves unwilling to extend that debate beyond the schools and
into the ideologically sacred circle of the family. Where the
argument against corporal punishment in the schools has
prevailed, in fact, it has often cited parents' individual right to
punish their own children as they, and not educators acting for
the state, see fit. The situation is different in other countries. You
may not be surprised to hear that 91 countries have banned
corporal punishment in the schools, but you may be surprised to
hear that 23 countries have banned corporal punishment
everywhere within their borders, including in the home.
One result of this standoff is that the United States, despite being
one of the primary authors of the U.N.'s Convention on the
Rights of Children, which specifies that governments must take
appropriate measures to protect children from "all forms of
physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent
treatment, maltreatment or exploitation," is one of only two
nations that have not ratified it. The other is Somalia; 192
nations have ratified it. According to my colleague Liz Gershoff
of the University of Michigan, a leading expert on corporal
punishment of children, the main arguments that have so far
prevented us from ratifying it include the ones you would
expect—it would undermine American parents' authority as well
as U.S. sovereignty—plus a couple of others that you might not
have expected: It would not allow 17-year-olds to enlist in the
armed forces, and (although the Supreme Court's decision in
Roper v. Simmons has made this one moot, at least for now) it
would not allow executions of people who committed capital
crimes when they were under 18.
I know what you're thinking: Are there really 23 Scandinavian
countries? Sweden was, indeed, the first to pass a
comprehensive ban, but the list also includes Hungary, Bulgaria,
Spain, Israel, Portugal, Greece, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, and
New Zealand. According to advocates of the ban, another 20 or
so countries are committed to full prohibition and/or are
debating prohibitionist bills in parliament. The Council of
Europe was the first intergovernmental body to launch a
campaign for universal prohibition across its 47 member
countries.
Practically nobody in America knows or cares that the United
Nations has set a target date of 2009 for a universal prohibition
of violence against children that would include a ban on corporal
punishment in the home. Americans no doubt have many
reasons—some of them quite good—to ignore or laugh off
instructions from the United Nations on how to raise their kids.
And it's naive to think that comprehensive bans are
comprehensively effective. Kids still get hit in every country on
earth. But especially because such bans are usually promoted
with large public campaigns of education and opinion-shaping
We have so far limited our national debate on corporal
punishment by focusing it on the schools and conducting it at the
local and state level. We have shied away from even
theoretically questioning the primacy of rights that parents
exercise in the home, where most of the hitting takes place.
Whatever one's position on corporal punishment, we ought to be
able to at least discuss it with each other like grownups.
fighting words
Is Obama Another Dukakis?
Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?
By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 12:17 PM ET
Last week really ought to have been the end of the McCain
campaign. With the whole country feeling (and its financial class
acting) as if we lived in a sweltering, bankrupt banana republic,
and with this misery added to the generally Belarusian
atmosphere that surrounds any American trying to board a train,
catch a plane, fill a prescription, or get a public servant or
private practitioner on the phone, it was surely the moment for
the supposedly reform candidate to assume a commanding
position. And the Republican nominee virtually volunteered to
assist that outcome by making an idiot of himself several times
over, moving from bovine and Panglossian serenity about the
state of the many, many crippled markets to sudden bursts of
pointless hyperactivity such as the irrelevant demand to sack the
chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And yet, and unless I am about to miss some delayed
"groundswell" or mood shift, none of this has translated into any
measurable advantage for the Democrat. There are three possible
reasons for such a huge failure on Barack Obama's part. The
first, and the most widely canvassed, is that he is too nice, too
innocent, too honest, and too decent to get down in the arena and
trade bloody thrusts with the right-wing enemy. (This is rapidly
becoming the story line that will achieve mythic status, along
with allegations of racial and religious rumor-mongering, if he
actually loses in November.) The second is that crisis and
difficulty, at home and abroad, sometimes make electors slightly
more likely to trust the existing establishment, or some version
of it, than any challenger or newcomer, however slight. The third
is that Obama does not, and perhaps even cannot, represent
"change" for the very simple reason that the Democrats are a
status quo party.
To analyze this is to be obliged to balance some of the qualities
of Obama's own personality with some of the characteristics of
his party. Here's a swift test. Be honest. What sentence can you
quote from his convention speech in Denver? I thought so. All
right, what about his big rally speech in Berlin? Just as I
guessed. OK, help me out: Surely you can manage to cite a line
or two from his imperishable address on race (compared by
some liberal academics to Gettysburg itself) in Philadelphia? No,
not the line about his white grandmother. Some other line. Oh,
dear. Now do you see what I mean?
Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it
another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky
Dukakis? Well, after the self-imposed Jeremiah Wright
nightmare, he can't afford any more militancy, or militantsounding stuff, even if it might be justified. His other problems
are self-inflicted or party-inflicted as well. He couldn't have
picked a gifted Democratic woman as his running mate, because
he couldn't have chosen a female who wasn't the ever-present
Sen. Clinton, and so he handed the free gift of doing so to his
Republican opponent (whose own choice has set up a screech
from the liberals like nothing I have heard since the nomination
of Clarence Thomas). So the unquantifiable yet important
"atmospherics" of politics, with all their little X factors, belong
at present to the other team.
The Dukakis comparison is, of course, a cruel one, but it raises a
couple more questions that must be faced. We are told by
outraged Democrats that many voters still believe, thanks to
some smear job, that Sen. Obama is a Muslim. Yet who is the
most famous source of this supposedly appalling libel (as if an
American candidate cannot be of any religion or none)? Absent
any anonymous whispering campaign, the person who did most
to insinuate the idea in public—"There is nothing to base that on.
As far as I know"—was Obama's fellow Democrat and the junior
senator from New York. It was much the same in 1988, when Al
Gore brought up the Dukakis furlough program, later to be made
infamous by the name Willie Horton, against the hapless
governor of Massachusetts who was then his rival for the
nomination.
By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got
the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very
least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea
about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in
his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He
was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for
2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and
the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in
Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got
the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do
with it or what to do about it.
Look at the record, and at Obama's replies to essential and
pressing questions. The surge in Iraq? I'll answer that only if you
insist. The credit crunch? Please may I be photographed with
Bill Clinton's economic team? Georgia? After you, please, Sen.
McCain. A vice-presidential nominee? What about a guy who,
despite his various qualities, is picked because he has almost no
enemies among Democratic interest groups?
I ran into a rather clever Republican operative at the airport last
week, who pointed out to me that this ought by rights to be a
Democratic Party year across the board, from the White House
to the Congress to the gubernatorial races. But there was a
crucial energy leak, and it came from the very top. More people
doubted Obama's qualifications for the presidency in September
than had told the pollsters they had doubted these credentials in
July. "So what he ought to do," smiled this man, "is spend his
time closing that gap and less time attacking McCain." Obama's
party hacks, increasingly white and even green about the gills,
are telling him to do the opposite. I suppose this could even
mean that Sarah Palin, down the road, will end up holding the
door open for Hillary Clinton. Such joy!
foreigners
Saving Jerusalem
The city has almost as many mayoral candidates as it has problems to solve.
By Shmuel Rosner
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 11:18 AM ET
It was 5:27 on a Monday morning, and someone was knocking
on the door. Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, at 98 the spiritual
leader of hundreds of thousands, was preparing to leave for the
synagogue. But urgent business had to be addressed first. The
guest was ushered into the house for a brief meeting. Is it
advisable for me to run for mayor of Jerusalem? the visitor
asked. In one form or another—nobody knows exactly what was
said—Elyashiv gave his blessing. The guest, Aryeh Deri, former
Knesset member, former minister of the interior, former leader
of the Shas Party—and a convicted felon—was therefore free to
decide: If the courts allow it, he is going to run.
Overused, overquoted, and overanalyzed, Yehuda Amichai's
poem "Mayor" has become a familiar cliché in Israel: "It's sad,/
To be the Mayor of Jerusalem./ It is terrible,/ How can any man
be the mayor of a city like that?" Overused—but evidently not
intimidating enough. As sad and terrible as the job may be, the
list of men who want to be the city's new mayor come Nov. 11 is
growing by the day.
There's Meir Porush, a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) who hopes to
repeat the success of the current mayor, the first Haredi to hold
the office. There's Nir Barkat, a secular high-tech millionaire
entrepreneur. There's Arcady Gaydamak, a flamboyant Russianborn populist billionaire. And now, there's Deri—a Sephardic
Haredi—a political meteor of the 1990s, investigated and
convicted for bribery in one of the most controversial trials the
country ever saw, well-known for his reformist spirit and
brilliance. Deri will be able to run only if the court decides that
he is eligible.
All the candidates share one goal: to save Jerusalem. But they
don't agree about what they're saving it from. Barkat wants to
"save" Jerusalem from Haredi expansion. Porush would like to
save it from a return to secular rule. Deri wants to save the
Haredi community from Porush, who is perceived as "too
Haredi" to be electable. The Russian billionaire's motivations
aren't exactly clear, and he might quit the race, but for the
moment his main cause seems to be saving Jerusalem's sports
teams.
And, of course, they all want to save Jerusalem from the Arab
Palestinians—about one-third of Jerusalem's population—who
traditionally don't vote in elections because they don't recognize
Israel's sovereignty. This year, however, they may reconsider
this Palestinian tradition: For the first time, a Palestinian
Jerusalemite has announced that he is definitely going to run.
(Previous potential Arab candidates didn't make it to the polls
under pressure from the Palestinian leadership in the West
Bank.)
Jerusalem is a city in perpetual crisis. Israelis overwhelmingly
say they oppose its division; Palestinians overwhelmingly
demand that it be the capital of their future state. In May 2007,
the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute published a
"strategic plan for the strengthening of Jerusalem as the
civilizational capital of the Jewish people." This worthy goal is
fraught by difficulties: "Jerusalem is a poor city"; "conflicts
hinder Jerusalem from being seen as non-controversial center"; it
is "not seen as a safe city"—as was proved earlier this week by
yet another terror attack; it is "hostile to diversity"; and so on
and so forth.
So, saving it will not be the easiest of tasks. Jews have been
leaving Jerusalem in large numbers in recent years: Fourteen
thousand per year left between 1990 and 1994, 16,000 19952004, 17,400 2005-07. Meanwhile, the number of people
moving to the city of nearly 750,000 was much smaller. Fortythree percent of those who left said they could find no work in
Jerusalem. Indeed, the more that East Jerusalem Palestinians and
West Jerusalem ultra-Orthodox make up the vast majority of
Jerusalemites, the more the city faces difficulties sustaining a
viable economy. The 2007 edition of "Jerusalem: Facts and
Trends," produced by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies,
concluded that 32 percent of families in Jerusalem live below the
poverty line—compared with 14 percent of the families in
metropolitan Tel Aviv and 21 percent in Israel as a whole.
The men who would be mayor have two very different attitudes
toward poverty: The ultra-Orthodox candidates point out that
their community is in greater need of help. Nir Barkat will
emphasize his economic background. He will argue, not without
merit, that the Orthodox are the problem, rather than the
solution, for Jerusalem. Haredi men, who study the Torah
instead of working, and Palestinian women, who stay home
because of Arab traditionalism, are largely responsible for the
city's low rate of work participation.
Saving the holiest and perhaps most complicated city in the
world is a task littered with obstacles. Can anyone convince the
Haredi community that it is in their interest to vote against their
own candidates? Can anyone convince secular Jerusalemites that
the "Haredi scare" (secular Jerusalem's erroneous belief that the
ultra-Orthodox are "taking over") is being used for political
reasons, and that a Haredi mayor can do the job as well as
anyone else? Is it even realistic to expect that the city can be
efficiently governed—saved—when the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is not yet solved?
If the ultra-Orthodox split their votes between the two Haredi
candidates, a secular candidate will have a better chance of
winning. Barkat is leading in the polls, but pollsters often make
mistakes in places with a large Haredi population, since they
tend not to respond to surveys. If the court bars Deri from
running, maybe Porush will have a better chance. On the other
hand, it is Deri, rather than Porush, who could also win votes
from beyond the Haredi neighborhoods. And if the Arabs
suddenly decide to participate, that could also be a gamechanging event.
Jerusalem is internationally important, but it is becoming more
fractured, more polarized, more prone to being torn apart by
interest groups. The political choices are as numerous as the
problems that need to be solved. But in the end, the outcome of
this year's mayoral race—arguably one of the most fascinating in
the city's 3,000-year history—will be determined by local trends,
influential rabbis, and by the power of one faction to cancel out
another. The next mayor will probably be the candidate who is
most successful at taking advantage of Jerusalemites' fears.
foreigners
Fixing Failed Aid
The chaos of foreign aid in Afghanistan.
By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 7:47 PM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan—The scene is a small textile factory in a
new industrial park on the outskirts of Kabul; the characters are
an Afghan businessman, his American partner, and a USAID
official, the last straight out of central casting, flustered,
important, accompanied by gun-wielding bodyguards. She
speaks of USAID's plans for "small- and medium-sized
enterprise development," lauds the USAID-funded industrial
park, and alludes to the "$5.4 billion" spent by USAID in
Afghanistan since 2002. She also hands out an expensivelooking USAID brochure that describes, among other things, the
goal of our meeting: "to show international media opinion
leaders that progress is being made in economic growth in
Afghanistan."
Unfortunately, the factory is half-empty that day. Prices for fuel
and other inputs are so high in Kabul that no textile business can
compete with those in India or Pakistan. The factory thus
depends on Afghan army-uniform orders, which arrive
irregularly. So does fabric to make them, since the customs
bureaucracy is still plagued by corruption and inefficiency.
When the USAID official starts listing the assistance given to
the Afghan customs service—this includes training for customs
officials, construction of border posts, even gifts of uniforms—
the American partner shrugs, unimpressed. "It would be good to
move forward instead of backward," she says. "There's never
any follow-through." Afterward, the Afghan businessman
confides that he has been robbed by Afghan police. It isn't the
Taliban that Afghan entrepreneurs fear; it is their own
government, corrupted by international money and now
infiltrated by criminal networks, too.
This is the chaos that is foreign aid in Afghanistan, a place
where every mistake ever made in every underdeveloped
economy is now being repeated. This is a country in which all
the best people are being hired away from the national
government by the alphabet soup of aid agencies on the ground;
in which the same alphabet soup of aid agencies is driving up
real-estate and food prices; in which millions of dollars are
squandered on dubious contractors, both local and foreign; in
which the minister for rural development says he doesn't know
what all the NATO reconstruction teams in rural districts do; in
which the top U.N. official, given a mandate to coordinate the
donors, says the donors don't respond to his attempts to
coordinate them.
Conflicting agendas, overlapping projects, money badly spent.
We've been here before, many times, and the conclusions are
always the same. Some of them have been recently restated by a
former Afghan minister of finance, Ashraf Ghani, and his coauthor, Clare Lockhart, in their book Fixing Failed States. Its
central argument: Well-meaning foreigners should not fix roads;
they should teach the Afghan government how to fix roads, thus
helping it acquire legitimacy. Foreigners shouldn't feed Afghans,
either; rather, they should develop Afghan agriculture so the
Afghans can feed themselves, export their surplus, and thus
develop a stake in the rule of law.
Some of this thinking has filtered down to the Afghan provinces,
where Afghanization is now a buzz word and foreign
construction projects now fly the Afghan flag. But the change in
attitude may have come too late: A harsh winter, a bad drought,
and constant fighting mean that Afghanistan, which suffered a
terrible famine in 2001, may well be on the brink of another one.
Starving Afghans? Think about it: A greater indictment of the
massive international aid-and-reconstruction effort would be
hard to imagine.
And an Afghan famine would not constitute just a humanitarian
crisis. To put it bluntly, Afghans who have no food are easily
purchased by the Taliban, al-Qaida, and other extremist leaders
who come over the border from Pakistan looking to pay
insurgents. Last weekend's bomb blast in Islamabad is an
excellent reminder of just how sophisticated these groups have
become. But you don't have to go over the border to find trouble.
Recent attacks on NATO soldiers in previously peaceful parts of
northern and western Afghanistan are evidence that poverty and
insecurity are spreading, not shrinking, within the country.
For once, the solution lies not in greater funds but in moreintelligent use of the massive resources available. It may partly
lie in smaller, Afghan charities like Afghan Health and
Development Services, which sends family doctors (without
security teams) out to the provinces, where they work in
conjunction with the Ministry of Health; or with less demanding
foreigners like the Filipino aid workers who have set up a credit
union—following Islamic banking practices, of course—in the
provincial city of Tarin Kowt. They lack qualified staff, and they
don't like the gunfire they hear at night. But with the advantage
of "looking Afghan" ("People think I am Tajik," one of them
told me, laughing), they soldier on: Their credit union now has
467 members and has made 83 loans. A little bit of money goes
a long way in Afghanistan, they tell me. Too bad so many in the
aid community still haven't learned this after all these years.
gardening
perennials, shrubs, and trees off to a faster start the following
spring. In mild-winter parts of the country, fall is even more
emphatically the superior season for planting because roots can
keep growing all winter.
Plants shift their objectives when the sun wanes and the
temperatures go down. They stop the spring and summer work
of making leaves, shoots, flowers, berries, and fruit. All their
energy goes into establishing roots.
Trees, shrubs, and perennials put into the ground in fall don't
have to deal with heat and drought early in their young lives. By
late next spring, when things begin to heat up, the plant's roots
will be up to the job of absorbing and circulating nutrients and
water. The class of October 2008, in other words, will be better
equipped next summer than their brethren freshly planted in
April 2009.
"Autumn Is a Second Spring"
The advantages of planting a garden in the fall.
By Constance Casey
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 6:45 AM ET
If these climate factors aren't enough, consider that fall planting
can save you money. Many nurseries mark their perennials and
shrubs 20 percent off in the fall. They'd like to unload plants so
they don't have to water them through the winter.
The landscape around us is obviously winding down as the days
grow colder and the nights get longer. Mid-to-late fall sees most
of the plant world going from mellow to muted to moribund.
But, contrary though it seems, this is the best time of the year to
plant new things and to work in the garden.
A couple of cautionary notes: When you walk the garden center
aisles, the perennials may look sad. Remember that their life
force is in the roots and crown—the place where the base of the
leaves meets the roots. This time of year, you don't want a lot of
leaves. Look at the picture on the plant label and have hope.
The reason is simply fall weather, which, up until the ground
freezes, is kind to human beings as well as to newly planted
trees, shrubs, and perennial plants.
Look for container-grown, or balled and burlapped, shrubs and
trees. For all the season's benefits, fall is not a good time to dig
trees out of a field where their roots have sprawled and would
have to be trimmed back.
In autumn, there are many more good days to be outside than
there are in spring. Serious gardeners love November; they're
happy working up a sweat inside their hoodies and gloves when
everyone else is starting to huddle indoors. The season fits the
typical gardener's temperament—moody, melancholy, prepared
for doom, and happily surprised when something does well.
(This was typical among my gardener colleagues at the New
York City Parks Department. But that may have just been a
result of the city stressors.)
At first thought, spring, with its explosion of buds and shoots
and sprouts seems like the best time to put new plants in the
ground. But spring in much of North America has quite a small
window for planting—between the last frost and the onset of hot
weather. Some of the days in that window will be rainy, making
the soil muddy and hard to work with a lot of the time. The soil
takes a while to warm up from a winter's worth of cold; a new
plant's roots grow slowly in chilled earth.
In fall, the soil still holds summer's warmth, which encourages
root growth up until the ground freezes. Fall planting gets
If you garden in a cold-winter area, it's better to wait till spring
to plant shrubs or perennials that are marginal—things like
buddleia or caryopteris.
Fall transplanting means using less water. It's cooler, and the
plants are less thirsty while they're going dormant. But those
recently planted shrubs and perennials and trees do need a deep,
thorough soaking at planting time; and when there's no snow
cover, water every four weeks or so through the winter.
Here's the most important caution. You may want to give your
new plants a little artificial assistance in the form of fertilizer.
Don't give them a fertilizer that is high in nitrogen, which would
encourage succulent, green, springlike growth at a time when
you, and the plant, want dormancy.
For immediate cheer, remember that anywhere but in the most
tropical parts of the country you can put in pansies. A newly
bred super race of the velvety flower, with names like
"Snowman" and "Icicle," has just hit the market. In horticulture
labs, scientists have intensified pansies' natural cold tolerance.
(They're related to wild violets, which developed a sort of
antifreeze in order to survive the cold on the deeply shady forest
floor.) These new pansies will bloom now, sit tight under the
snow, and pop back to bloom again in spring. Not surprisingly,
they hate heat, and you'll probably have to compost them next
spring.
Even if you don't feel like buying anything new, fall is a good
time for cathartic, satisfyingly destructive garden activities.
Leave echinacea, sunflowers, and cosmos to go to seed and feed
the birds, but tear up annuals like impatiens, marigolds, petunias,
zinnias, and tomato plants. If you're not ready to start a compost
pile, here's an alternative that requires high aerobic output (and
saves on plastic garbage bags): Dig a trench in your vegetable
plot. Pile in the tomato stalks and shriveled pepper plants and
blackened basil plants, etc. Cover with earth, and next spring
you will have Worm City and good soil.
Since we've gotten candidates from Hawaii and Alaska, I've
been enjoying the sound of the phrase "the noncontiguous
United States." It turns out that even in Alaska, fall is a good
time to plant. It's true that by Halloween Anchorage usually has
snow on the ground. But up until then, as long as the ground isn't
frozen, Alaskans should be digging.
For residents of everywhere else: Even if you've never done a
thing in your garden, plant some spring bulbs. You can do this
late; it's actually best to plant bulbs after a killing frost. Their
only demand is a sunny spot and well-drained soil.
One more note on composting: When wild tulips first came to
Western Europe from Turkey in 1562, the burghers of Antwerp,
who saw them as onionish, tried to eat them. Not surprisingly,
they didn't like them and had their servants toss the extra bulbs
onto a pile of organic refuse. The bulbs rooted themselves in the
muck and flowered—another tribute to the generative powers of
compost heaps. A few centuries later, the Dutch, including a
young Audrey Hepburn, would eat them during the days of the
Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
green room
Adam Smith Meets Climate Change
How the theory of moral sentiments could be applied to cap-and-trade
greenhouse-gas emissions.
By Ian Ayres and Doug Kysar
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 11:53 AM ET
Despite all the attention to domestic oil drilling, Obama and
McCain are not that far apart on climate change—both
candidates support a cap-and-trade system to limit U.S.
greenhouse-gas emissions. And neither candidate has told us
much about how they will get the rest of the world on the capand-trade bandwagon. That challenge deserves more focus—
unless we can entice fast-growing emitters like China, India, and
Brazil into a climate change treaty as full participants, even
complete energy independence in this country will be little
consolation in a warming world. We think Adam Smith may
have had a suggestion for how to think about this problem—and
it's more than just an invisible hand.
For 30 years now, officials have been groping toward a system
in which greenhouse-gas emitters all around the world can trade
permits. GHG reductions achieve the same global atmospheric
benefit regardless of where they occur, but because industries
and firms have different costs of reduction, it makes economic
sense to allow them to trade permits. That way we can lower
emissions for less money.
But a crucial sticking point is figuring out how to initially
allocate emissions permits among the various countries of the
world. Generally speaking, richer nations want permit allotments
that track historic emissions rates—essentially locking in their
economic advantage by awarding permits based on how much a
country is already emitting. Developing countries, in contrast,
want permits allocated according to population size, with every
person on the planet getting equal emissions rights. Some
representatives from poorer nations also point to the fact that
countries have not contributed equally to the existing problem of
global warming. They argue that the countries most responsible
for the current state of affairs, like the United States, should get
the fewest permits, since they have already spent their share of
the planet's GHG budget.
Whatever the merits of the arguments, any attempt to load this
kind of ethical discussion into the decision of how to allocate
GHG permits spells diplomatic disaster. It leads back to the
same game of GHG chicken we've been playing for years.
And that's where Adam Smith comes in. In addition to his
famous arguments in favor of markets and liberalized trade,
Smith also had a well-worked-out theory of moral behavior, one
that was not so neatly separated from his economic thought as
we treat it today. For example, Smith's arguments in favor of
free trade included an assumption that owners of capital would
naturally prefer domestic to foreign industry, even if the latter
offered higher returns. Smith thought this was a good thing
because it reflected the moral sentiments that ultimately help
make markets work.
Today, capital chases investment opportunities all over the globe
with little sense of social allegiance. Nevertheless, other ways of
fulfilling Smith's vision have emerged: Firms, activists, and
others have sought to reinfuse the market with moral content by
giving consumers information about the circumstances in which
products are produced. Sweatshop-free clothing, shade-grown
coffee, fair-trade bananas, electricity generated from renewable
resources—demand for these kinds of goods and services is
spreading throughout the marketplace and blurring boundaries
between citizen and consumer, government and economy, local
and foreign. The market is starting to look as morally rich as it
did to Adam Smith, only on a global basis.
So here's the proposal: Rather than debate endlessly about how
to carve up the spoils from just one global GHG currency, why
not separate GHG permits into different brands based on how
seriously they take the question of climate justice? Imagine an
annual GHG cap that is subdivided into two categories. First,
each country would receive a share of "regular" permits based on
historic emissions rates or whatever base-line allocation method
emerges from international negotiations. Second, each country
would receive "justice" permits based on some formula that
takes into account factors like population size and previous
contributions to climate change.
The easiest approach to allocating justice permits would follow
the preferred approach of developing countries—i.e., "the bigger
your population, the more permits you get." Call this the
"distributive justice" approach. A more ambitious formula would
add a further tilt in favor of developing countries on account of
unequal past contributions to the present GHG buildup. Call this
the "distributive plus corrective justice" approach. No doubt
there would be diplomatic battles about how precisely to fix the
allocation formula, but at least those battles would no longer be
focused, all-or-nothing, on a single climate currency.
Creating a separate market for justice permits also would offer
the prospect of generating more money per permit for
developing countries. Both regular and justice permits would
entitle the holder to emit a ton of CO2 and both types would be
fully tradable, but the justice permits would carry with them the
right to advertise that goods and services were produced using
the more equitably allocated emissions rights. The moral
sentiments of consumers would then determine whether justicebranded products could be sold at a premium. For instance, we
envision gas pumps of the future that give consumers a choice
between "regular" and "justice added" brands. A premium price
for justice brands would translate into compensation for
emissions inequality.
The concept might seem a bit too abstract for consumers at first.
But products from sustainably managed forests and fisheries
probably also seemed abstract at one time, yet now they fill the
shelves at mainstream stores like Home Depot and Wal-Mart.
These firms know that the consumers most likely to be attracted
to "justice" branding are also the ones willing to invest the time
and energy to understand the brand's meaning. A customer might
not look at a justice-branded sneaker and say to himself, "Hey,
great, this was produced with carbon credits obtained via a
progressive cap-and-trade system that imposes a penalty on
richer nations that have been polluting for a longer time!" But he
might get the bigger message—that the logo represents a larger
system for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions while giving lessdeveloped nations a chance to catch up in global markets.
At a time of high energy prices and a reeling economy, this
proposal may sound a tad Pollyanna-ish, but consider the fact
that the voluntary carbon offset market more than tripled in
value last year to $331 million, according to one recent report.
Our proposal would allow GHG altruism to continue in the
coming carbon-constrained economy, and it would do so with
fewer transaction costs and greater reliability than the current illdefined and poorly monitored offset market.
This is a once-in-a-species opportunity. The global architecture
necessary to produce a trading scheme is already being built.
Whatever allocation of GHG emissions rights is eventually
chosen will require a system for reporting, monitoring, and
trading that could easily accommodate additional permit
variations along the lines of our proposal. Consumers have
moral sentiments about climate change. They just need a hand
expressing them.
heavy petting
Hospice Dog
My border collie Izzy comforts the dying.
By Jon Katz
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 10:57 AM ET
Excerpted from Izzy & Lenore: Two Dogs, An Unexpected
Journey, and Me, by Jon Katz, which comes out today from
Villard.
The county health department was housed in a small wooden
annex in run-down Fort Edward, N.Y., near the county jail. I
parked the Blazer and opened the rear door for Izzy, who
disembarked, sniffed around, then paused to look at me,
awaiting instructions.
"This way, boy," I said, and he trotted along next to me toward
the annex, ignoring a dog being walked nearby, a number of
trucks and cars in motion, other people walking through the
parking lot.
At the door, he walked inside, scanned the half-dozen people in
the meeting room, and headed straight for Keith Mann, a
muscular, bald man in a polo shirt emblazoned with the
Washington County logo. Keith was running the series of
hospice volunteer training sessions, held in the annex over
several weeks.
Izzy sat down in front of Keith and put his nose in his hand.
Keith handed us our name tags, as if it were perfectly ordinary to
have trainees with either two legs or four. One said: "Izzy Katz,
Volunteer."
This training would test both of us. I had a book coming out, so I
was about to start an extended tour. Insanely busy running the
farm, I was already harried and drained, struggling to find time
to write.
Besides, hospice work was no simple undertaking. The training
alone was thorough and demanding, involving considerable roleplaying, reading, and memorizing. The volunteer's handbook
weighed a good three pounds.
As a former police reporter, I'd seen plenty of bodies, but I'd
rarely known anything about the people who died. Here, I would
be going into homes and nursing facilities, getting to know
people who were failing, getting to know their families, too—
and ultimately seeing them die. How would I handle that? Could
I do a good job, or would it be one of those projects I sometimes
took on obsessively and then, exhausted, had to drop?
I'd gone back and forth about making this commitment. I didn't
want to start something I couldn't finish, yet I was learning the
hard way how unpredictable and cluttered my life had become.
At first, I'd thought that my busy schedule, complete with book
tour, might cause the program to cut me some slack. Could I
really drive three nights a week, for several weeks, to Fort
Edward?
was locked onto Keith, as if listening intently to every word. I
half expected him to take notes.
When we took a break, Izzy followed me outside, where he
found a bush to mark, then came back in and approached each of
the other volunteers, putting his nose in their laps or on their
knees. If they responded, he stayed a while. If they didn't, he
moved on. Keith always brought a biscuit or two, so Izzy made
sure to visit him during the break.
Several things struck me during our early training. Izzy seemed
to have an innate sense of appropriateness. He never disrupted
the talks or meetings by barking, whining, or even moving
much. He understood that the breaks were a time for socializing
but the rest of the session was work.
Six other volunteers were going through the training with us, all
arrayed around a conference table, listening to lectures, watching
slides, talking about our own lives and our abilities to enter other
people's. Through it all, Izzy sat by my side or, often, at Keith's
feet, taking it all in.
In a sense, hospice training challenges volunteers to go against
the grain of what we ordinarily think of as support, concern, and
affection. Normally, if I see people in distress, I try to reassure
them, to tell them things will get better, that they're doing fine.
Hospice training teaches you to do the very opposite. In hospice,
the ending will always be the same: The patient will not recover;
there will be no eleventh-hour happy ending.
But it was clear, as Keith explained the volunteer training to me,
that there would be no slack, no shortcuts—and that there
shouldn't be. The hospice program needed to make quite sure
that the people who entered patients' homes, where the
psychological and physical issues were often intense, knew what
they were doing and could handle what they encountered.
Reassurances and conventional wisdoms can't really help the
dying or those who love them. Each person, family or friend,
will experience death in their own intensely personal way, and I
have no tonics for them, no words of cheer. I must leave my own
experiences, perceptions, and responses at the door and permit
them to face and experience death in whatever way they choose.
My role is to listen and help only in the ways that I'm asked to.
It's an extraordinarily sensitive situation.
Accordingly, our training involved talks with social workers,
doctors, and other volunteers; field trips to the homes of patients;
quizzes—and constant monitoring by hospice staff, alert for
weaknesses or problems that might arise. I found my motives
questioned again and again. I actually had to defend my desire to
enlist.
Yet the work seems so crucial. Hospice workers often talk about
the mistreatment of the dying, by which they mean not cruelty
but the natural human tendency to shun death, to avoid the dying
and retreat from even thoughts or discussions about it.
Keith was a skilled instructor, adhering strictly to his orientation
and lesson plans—but he also kept a sharp eye on the volunteers
to see how we reacted.
Hospice families tell me all the time about the pain of having
friends stop calling or visiting, of seeing them turn away from
them at the supermarket, simply flee in the face of death's
awesome finality.
From the outset, at least one volunteer paid rapt attention. Izzy
sat staring at Keith throughout nearly the entire session.
Sometimes, I did look down to see Izzy dozing. But usually he
So we leave them, often quite alone, to their fates, to the
struggles with our health care system, to a culture too busy and
distracted—or uncomfortable—to pay much attention.
The last thing these people need is some well-meaning volunteer
who attempts to cheer them up, offer suggestions on how to die,
or tell them how to grieve. All we can do is provide some
companionship and comfort along the way. It's a humbling
mission.
To bring a dog into these homes seemed an even greater
challenge. Patients are often in emotional or physical distress,
hooked up to oxygen or IVs, and taking potent medications. Lots
of dogs do therapy work, but hospice requires something a dog
really can't be trained to do—figure out for himself how to be
loving, appropriate, and sensitive to the dying.
To be a hospice dog, Izzy had to be tested by a vet, who issued a
certificate attesting to his temperament. I did considerable
calming training, praising him for being calm, practicing moving
around furniture and other obstacles. We tried him out in several
strangers' homes and in a nursing home with a PA system and
lots of medical equipment around. And, of course, he attended
all our training sessions, where nurses and social workers were
watching him carefully.
But the truth was, I had no clear idea how to prepare Izzy. His
own instincts and personality, I thought, would prove more
critical than any training in determining whether he could do this
work. All I could do was bring him along, into patients' homes
and lives, and see what he could offer.
All through the spring and summer, we trekked to Fort Edward,
with a sandwich and fruit in a paper bag for me and a few
biscuits for Izzy. Keith kept a water bowl in the annex kitchen
for him. The volunteers were an extraordinarily generous group
of people who seemed quite willing to accept us both, and Izzy
was happy to see each of them at every session.
I was daunted at first, by the detailed thoroughness of the
training, though I would soon enough be grateful for it. We
practiced what to say, what to look for, how to listen. We
learned to fill out forms and reports. There was a long list of
things to avoid saying—like "Buck up! You'll be OK!" The
sessions were wearying, but also gratifying. By the time they
concluded, I felt ready.
I can't say I know for certain why I wanted to sign up. Perhaps
weathering middle age makes one more aware of death, more
thoughtful about it. Perhaps, as my work life intensified, I
wanted to make sure I had a grounding, a meaningful
commitment to help me see life in perspective, to keep my
spiritual self alive. Maybe I wanted see if there was a way to
share this work with a dog. Maybe all of the above.
While we were learning, it was hard to avoid the sense that Keith
and the social workers were watching us pretty carefully.
Whatever our reasons for coming, we volunteers had to talk
about them. Stan had just lost his dad. Rita had lost her husband
a few years earlier, down South. Donna, it emerged—slowly—
had also lost someone, though she hadn't said whom.
On the surface, direct experience with grief would seem a
perfect qualification for hospice volunteers, but the staff pointed
out that it could also be a problem. We had to set our own losses
aside, not add to the sorrow the patients and their loved ones
already felt.
Donna and I were paired for role-playing during the second
week of training. She was a kindly woman, quietly but deeply
religious, and eager to help others. "What better way," she asked,
"than to help people leave the world comfortably, with dignity?"
In this exercise, one of us played the volunteer; the other
pretended to be a person who had lost someone dear. I drew the
volunteer role, which meant my job was to listen, to affirm the
feelings I was hearing, not challenge them or add my own or try
to change anyone's mind.
Donna, playing the family member, sat opposite me and said she
had a sick child, a son dying of leukemia. It was horrible, she
said softly, to watch her son suffer, wither, and fade. "I'm not
doing enough," she lamented. "I feel like I'm not doing enough,
no matter what I do."
It was useful practice because under normal circumstances I
surely would have reassured her, told her that of course she was
doing enough, and urged her not to be so tough on herself. This
"character" was, after all, sitting by her son's bedside almost
around the clock, reading stories to him, administering
medications, making him as comfortable as possible. What more
could she possibly do?
"How long have you felt this way, that you're not doing
enough?" I asked—a neutral question, meant to allow her to
communicate but not to talk her out of what she was feeling or
dismiss it by suggesting it wasn't really true.
She told me more about her son and his diagnosis, his weakness
and decline, about the fact that he might die at any moment
while she was right there watching, and how helpless she felt to
prevent it.
As she spoke, Donna's eyes welled and her face contorted with
grief. I was surprised to see Izzy appear out of nowhere, put his
head on her knee, and stare up into her eyes.
Suddenly, I saw what he, perhaps, saw. I understood that Donna
was no longer playing a role; she had lived this. She wasn't
simply a volunteer portraying a stricken mother. We had moved
into the realm of real loss.
I don't know what dogs can see or sense, but I know they can
discern things that I can't. Rose sees things invisible to me when
she is working with sheep. Izzy had some sort of insight about
people.
"I'm sorry, Donna," I said. "How long ago did your son die?"
She put her face in her hands and sobbed. "Five years. Five
years." And we were done.
The social workers were pleased; they said I'd handled things
well, had been perceptive in seeing that Donna was still actively
working through her grief, something important for them—and
her—to understand as she ventured into hospice work. And Izzy
had been a model of empathic restraint.
We all bonded over those weeks, eating cookies and sharing
stories of loss from our own lives. I talked about the deaths I'd
seen as a reporter, the two pregnancies we had lost before our
daughter, Emma's, birth. I talked, too, about my fear of losing a
sense of spirituality in my too-busy life.
We played hospice quiz games and watched hospice movies and
talked to a stream of social workers, a warm, funny, intensely
dedicated group who reported high rates of burnout and stress
among their ranks.
The staff talked a lot about volunteer burnout, too, about the
need to prepare for this curious truth: Everybody you are visiting
will die, and your job is not to save them but to help them leave
with as much comfort and dignity as possible. It will be
wrenching, surprising, different every time. It isn't for
everybody. There are support groups for us, too, numbers to call,
help available.
We were briefed by lawyers and nurses and bereavement
counselors. We were taught how to spot trouble—filthy
conditions, spilled medicines, rising pain, family members
breaking down—and to notify the hospice staff immediately.
We all had fears, doubts, and many questions. Could we bring
food or books or other gifts? Pass out our phone numbers? What
if we saw family members fighting or patients being mistreated?
Could you sense death before it came? What was it like? What
were the signs? What if somebody died while we were there?
How did people grieve, and for how long? What was helpful and
sensitive? What wasn't?
But training convinced me that I wanted to do this. Besides, it
seemed no longer purely my decision. Izzy had enrolled. At the
end of the summer, we completed our training, passed our
background security checks, got fingerprinted (well, one of us).
Izzy and I received our certificates and photo IDs at a ceremony
complete with cake. We would be notified of our first
assignment in a few weeks.
Soon enough, we were on the job. Keith mailed me a hospice
assignment sheet, telling me the patient's name and address and
condition.
On a muggy, late-summer afternoon, we drove to a small
bungalow next to a church on a tree-lined street. I was anxious,
going over the training in my mind. This looked like any other
house, I thought—then chided myself for such foolishness. Why
wouldn't it look ordinary? How easy it was to stigmatize death,
to the point of expecting a dying person's house to visibly
proclaim its status.
The patient, named Jamie, was 86 and in the final stages of
Alzheimer's disease. No longer willing to be touched, terrified of
even her own family, she was deemed difficult to handle. The
social workers were concerned about her daughter, who'd
exhausted herself and her savings caring for her mother. Hospice
hoped a dog might help settle her; she'd been a dog-lover all her
life.
The protocol was rigid. Izzy and I both had to wear our photo
IDs, and I had to wash my hands, going in and coming out. We
were not permitted to drive patients, to have anything to do with
medicines or medical equipment, to perform any kinds of handson care. Technically, we weren't even supposed to touch the
people we were visiting, although most of us trafficked in illicit
hugs.
A former schoolteacher, Jamie had been moved into a first-floor
bedroom in her daughter's house. Carol had been caring for her
faithfully for several years, but it was growing steadily harder.
Jamie slept much of the time, but often yelled or cried out when
she was awake. It had become increasingly problematic for the
nurses, or even her daughter, to bathe her or change her clothes;
she seemed terrified of physical contact and struggled,
sometimes to the point of bruising her fragile skin. Carol was
worn and weary from the effort. Yet any suggestion of a nursing
home was anathema.
Much of the time, the two women were alone in this small frame
house, Carol sitting by her mother's bedside, reading or talking
to her. Most of the neighbors didn't even know that Jamie was
terminally ill, Carol said. They had few visitors. Once her
mother had lost her ability to recognize them, friends had drifted
away, and family members came by infrequently. She
encountered growing problems talking to them anyway, Carol
confessed; they seemed to inhabit some other planet.
When Izzy and I came into the house, Keith was waiting for us,
as was customary when volunteers paid their first visit to new
patients.
Carol, a slight, round-faced woman wearing a lavender
sweatsuit, was pleased to see us, welcomed us, and knelt down
to pat Izzy. I'd been warned that she was bone-tired and
increasingly anxious about her mother, who might sleep all day
and then cry out in the middle of the night.
In a tiny, meticulously clean powder room, I washed my hands,
carefully and thoroughly, as instructed; Izzy waited outside the
bathroom door.
I could see a bedroom at the end of the hall, decorated with
family photos and fresh-cut flowers. As we drew closer to the
room, I could hear a TV; Carol explained she kept it on most of
the time, so her mother could hear voices and feel less lonely.
A beautiful older woman was lying in bed, beneath a summer
quilt. Someone had carefully arranged her silvery hair, polished
her fingernails, even daubed on a touch of lipstick. She was
mouthing barely audible words and moving a bit restlessly.
"This is so great, the dog coming. She loved her dogs so much,"
whispered Carol as we entered the room.
Carol introduced us loudly and slowly. "This is Izzy," she said.
"And Jon. They've come to see you. Izzy is just like Flash. You
remember Flash, Mama, don't you?"
Jamie stared at the ceiling and began mumbling. I came to the
foot of the bed, looked at Izzy, and gestured to the foot of the
bed; he hopped up. "Stay," I whispered, and he sat stock-still.
Jamie seemed unaware of his presence. I waited. Carol was
quiet, too. Keith, watching from the doorway, might have been
nervous about what would happen with Washington County
Hospice's first canine volunteer.
Izzy seemed a bit uncertain, not sure what was happening,
looking first at me, then at Jamie. He'd never been in the
company before of someone so debilitated, so close to the end;
clearly, it was strange to him. Was it smart, I found myself
wondering, to bring along this dog, who'd spent most of the first
four years of his life alone outdoors? But he looked all right, his
ears and tail up, no signs of stress or anxiety. In fact, he seemed
to be studying the room, looking carefully at me, at Jamie and
Carol, seeking cues.
He lay down and very slowly began inching up the side of the
bed. He didn't step on Jamie, or even graze her frail body, just
crept slowly alongside her. When he got close to her hand, he
burrowed his head beneath it and lay still.
Jamie stopped muttering. Her face looked alarmed at first; then
she broke into a slight smile. She didn't look at Izzy, but moved
her hand slightly, feeling his forehead and his ears.
"Oh," she said. "Oh." And then, smiling, "Oh, how pretty ...
pretty."
"This is the first time she's said real words in weeks," Carol
whispered, astonished.
Izzy kept quite still as Jamie stroked him and talked in disjointed
sentences, still smiling. After a while, she drifted off. A few
minutes later, her hand still resting on Izzy's head, she awakened
and stared at the ceiling, and smiled again. She seemed calmer
than when we'd come in.
After 15 minutes, without instruction, Izzy extricated himself
and skipped down from the bed, circling around to Carol,
offering her a friendly paw. She kneeled on the floor, weeping,
and held Izzy for a long moment. Then our visit was over, the
hospice canine volunteer program launched.
"I can't explain how much this means," Carol told me as we left.
"For a minute I had my mother back."
We agreed to return the following week. Later, we learned that
Jamie allowed Carol to bathe and change her without fear or
resistance. Why this would be true was nothing any of us could
explain, but something was different.
Outside, Keith shook my hand and leaned over to praise Izzy.
"This works," he said. "This is awesome. Izzy is a natural. You
aren't so bad yourself."
history lesson
You Won't Learn Much From the
Debates
He cocked his head at me. "It's OK, Iz," I said. "Say hello."
But you should watch them anyway.
He seemed to get it then, some invisible trigger or instinct
kicking in. I hovered nearby, ready to move in quickly if there
was trouble. This was a dying woman who didn't want to be
touched. Would she be frightened or perhaps frighten Izzy? How
would he respond to a situation he'd never been in, couldn't
really be trained in advance to handle?
Since presidential debates became a quadrennial fixture in 1976,
the first encounter between the two parties' nominees has usually
drawn more than 60 million viewers. Friday's face-off between
Barack Obama and John McCain—should it go forward—will
By David Greenberg
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 5:41 PM ET
be no exception. The debates, we're told, attract such large
audiences because they're the last best chance for voters to
soberly size up two candidates, side by side, and come to a
decision.
The premise and promise of the debates is that they serve as a
tonic for an otherwise underinformed democratic citizenry,
providing a key source of data for reasoning voters about the
candidates' views on pressing issues. Unfortunately, over the
years the debates have proved to be formulaic, lacking in
spontaneity, and full of familiar pablum. But that doesn't mean
they're a waste of time. Ironically, admitting their failure can
help us to see their true value: not as an opportunity for voters to
learn anything new about the candidates but rather as an
occasion for all of us to get excited about politics.
The notion of the debates as a way to educate independentminded voters dates to the first televised debates in 1960,
between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. The debates'
chief boosters, the TV network executives, celebrated the
contests as an event tailor-made for the new mass-media age—a
modern counterpart to the 19th-century campaign spectacles such
as torchlight parades and mass rallies. Frank Stanton, the
legendary president of CBS, dismissed those old-style gatherings
as anachronistic—calculated, he said, "not to inform, or to create
an atmosphere conducive to the appraisal of information, but to
whip up attitudes capable of overcoming any temptation to
judiciousness." By 1960, Stanton said, "We can't afford the
blind, uncritical automatic support of one man against another,
whatever his insight, his judgment, or his qualities of
leadership." He asserted that the televised debates treated voters
as independent of mind, enlightening them about the candidates'
stands and enabling them to weigh the issues with the care they
deserved—a necessity in a modern democracy.
By Stanton's standard, the debates have failed. To review the
reviews of the debates since 1960 is to hear the recurring
complaint that the debates aren't worthy of the name. Each
election cycle someone points out that they should be billed as
"joint press conferences" and not "debates," a term that evokes
the Lincoln-Douglas jousts, next to which today's contests are
said to pale. In contrast to those fabled encounters between the
1858 Illinois Senate candidates (which weren't quite so elevated
as popular lore would have it), our TV-era debates are derided as
scripted and superficial. Candidates don't debate: They spew
boilerplate from their stump speeches, mouth a speechwriter's
one-liner, and try to avoid delving into any free-flowing giveand-take about the "issues" that might lead them to deviate from
their talking points. "The debates' inherent weakness is their
show-business nature; their heavy reliance on rehearsal and
grooming by professional image-makers; the concern for
appearance over substance," a New York Times editorial
complained in 1976.
This verdict is hard to gainsay. Anyone who watched the focus
groups of undecided voters convened by the networks to watch
the 2000 debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore had to
be at least mildly dismayed about the public's critical thinking.
On CBS, for example, one Sandra Harsh said she was swayed by
what she had seen. "I was very impressed with Bush's specifics,
his points of—of his program, what he planned to do," she said.
"I like—I liked the line about trusting people, not the federal
government. I liked his format for national health care. I—I
think he showed himself as the superior candidate." Not to be
harsh on Sandra, but if viewers who watched that debate came
away thinking that Bush would implement a national health care
plan, that should give us pause about the debates' value in
transmitting information.
But if the debates fall short of Frank Stanton's original goal—
helping the free-thinking citizen of the modern age rationally
judge the candidates on the issues—that doesn't mean we should
tune out. One reason is that Stanton's model of the value of
debates allows no place for people who watch the debates with
their minds made up. According to the prevalent view of what
the debates should do, these partisans are irrelevant. They're not
included in the networks' focus groups. No one cares if they
watch.
But not everyone who watches the debates belongs to that
fetishized class of undecided swing voters. If you're like me,
most years you await the general-election debates with eager
anticipation, notwithstanding your longstanding loyalties or your
made-up mind. I often find myself at a friend's apartment,
populated by similarly inclined partisans, enjoying the act of
rooting for the home team. (This tradition, too, is old. In 1960,
Democratic and Republican clubs hosted debate-watching
parties, as did Jackie Kennedy in Hyannisport, where Archibald
Cox, Arthur Schlesinger, and others gathered over coffee and
pastries to watch JFK best Nixon on a rented 16-inch portable
TV set.)
How do we fit so many viewers' enthusiasm for the debates into
the picture of their inadequacy as an information source?
The late scholar James Carey once proposed a distinction
between what he called a "transmission view" and a "ritual
view" of communication. The transmission view—with which
most of us usually operate—holds that the purpose of
communication (including presidential debates) is to impart
information, much as Stanton described. In contrast, the ritual
view—"a minor thread in our national thought," Carey noted—
treats acts of communication as rituals like holidays or parades,
deriving their meaning from the roles they play in our daily
experience. They summon forth or reinforce feelings,
dispositions, and attitudes. The campaign events of the 19 th
century that Stanton breezily denigrated may not have educated
voters, but they enriched their daily political experience.
Stanton, it turns out, had it backward: The debates matter
because they resemble the rallies and torchlight parades. Indeed,
only if we discard the dominant view of today's debates as a
source of information about the candidates' programs and think
of them instead as a civic ritual can we appreciate their real
value: a reminder of the pleasures of the campaign, as a social
glue, as a spur to political involvement.
Department on Sept. 26 to protest the "Wall Street Crisis and the
Federal Bail-Out." Both the flyer and a RainbowPUSH e-mail to
participants in the Congressional Black Caucus' annual
legislative conference (Page 2) term the scheduled protest an
"informational picket."
One piece of evidence comes from a project called Debate
Watch. Starting in 1992, the National Communication
Association and the Commission on Presidential Debates set up
Debate Watch to bring together citizens in local communities to
watch and discuss the contests. Although no hard verdicts are in,
evidence suggests that joining in these colloquies inclined
people to vote on Election Day. At the least, they appeared, as
one scholar of the project noted, to "engage voters in the ideas,
perspectives, and concerns of others in their communities." The
post-debate conversations tended to invigorate those who took
part, reviving a sense that politics and the election matter.
Send Hot Document ideas to documents@slate.com.
Be there or be square.
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 4:31 PM ET
Soon after the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, Jack Gould, the
television critic for the New York Times, marveled not about
Kennedy's superior image—the story line from those contests
that we remember—but at the more basic phenomenon of
renewed voter excitement. "Overnight, as it were," he wrote,
"there was born a new interest in the campaign that earlier had
been productive only of coast-to-coast somnolence."
hot document
The choreography and sound bites that constitute the presidential
debates may be an unreliable method for casual voters to get the
facts about the nominees. But in an age of desiccated politics,
when too many citizens feel adrift and overburdened in trying to
judge complex policy issues for themselves, the mere experience
of watching debates, or in discussing them "the next morning,"
as Gould wrote, "in kitchen, office, supermarket and commuter
train"—such time spent can have real value if it serves to thicken
our commitments to political life.
hot document
Jesse Jackson vs. Wall Street Bailout
The civil rights leader invites you to picket the Treasury Department.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 4:31 PM ET
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 4:31 PM ET
A five-color flyer from Jesse Jackson and his RainbowPUSH
Coalition (see below) invites readers to picket the U.S. Treasury
Too Sexy for My Sandbox
The Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood wins a victory against Bratz.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 4:51 PM ET
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Monday, September 22, 2008, at 4:51 PM ET
The Boston-based advocacy group Campaign for a CommercialFree Childhood is taking a victory lap for forcing Scholastic
Inc., the world's largest publisher of children's books, to halt
sales of popular Bratz titles including Catwalk Cuties and
Dancin' Divas. For some time, the group has urged parents to
send Scholastic letters and e-mail messages criticizing what it
considers hypersexualized Bratz images on display. The
Campaign contends that the Bratz female characters (who wear
"ultra-miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and bikinis") "undermine
young girls' healthy development." To bolster its argument, it
issued a fact sheet (see below and the following page) on how
"sexualizing childhood" leads to "eating disorders, low selfesteem, depression and poor sexual health."
Although Scholastic has discontinued sales of Bratz products
aimed at school children in its catalogs, book clubs, and book
fairs, the publisher claims the items were not withdrawn because
of the Campaign. "We change the offerings on a regular basis," a
spokeswoman told Adweek. Bratz products (including a DVD
that topped the Billboard Children's Chart) can still be purchased
at numerous other outlets.
version goes on to recite that "the terms of a residential mortgage
loan that is part of any purchase by the Secretary under this Act
shall remain subject to all claims and defenses that would
otherwise apply notwithstanding the exercise of authority by the
Secretary or Corporation under this Act."
Send Hot Document ideas to documents@slate.com.
How do these two alternatives stack up, constitutionally
speaking? In Paulson's defense, there is no absolute
constitutional prohibition on so-called "court-stripping" laws—
provisions that bar judicial review of decisions by executivebranch officials. To the contrary, there is explicit language in the
text of the Constitution that appears to grant Congress authority
to control the jurisdiction of federal courts. The Constitution's
Exceptions Clause describes the appellate jurisdiction of the
Supreme Court, with the trailing language, "with such
Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall
make." And the lower federal courts are entirely creatures of
Congress: The Constitution only created the Supreme Court,
leaving to the legislature the option to create lower courts as it
deemed wise. The greater power to bring lower federal courts
into existence implies the lesser power to place limits on the
scope of cases they may hear. Finally, the Supremacy Clause,
which makes federal law the supreme law of the land, trumping
state laws, presumably gives Congress the power to insulate
from state-court scrutiny the actions of federal officials who are
enforcing laws passed by Congress.
Posted Monday, September 22, 2008, at 4:51 PM ET
jurisprudence
Wall Street Strip
Is Paulson's bailout bill unconstitutional?
By Rod Smolla
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 1:43 PM ET
Does the Constitution have any role in the intense debate and
blowback surrounding Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion
bailout proposal? There is nothing in our founding document
that prohibits taxing Peter (us) to pay Paul (Wall Street). There
are constitutional principles, however, that speak to values such
as oversight and transparency. Our system of checks and
balances abhors a blank check.
And yet Secretary Paulson's proposal contains a sweeping
provision that utterly strips the courts of any power to review his
decisions. Section 8 of the Paulson proposal reads: "Decisions
by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are nonreviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be
reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
In contrast, an alternative bailout bill, sponsored by Democratic
Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, has a very different clause. The
Dodd proposal reads: "Any determination by the Secretary with
regard to any particular troubled asset pursuant to this Act …
shall not be set aside unless such determination is found to be
arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or not in accordance
with the law." In other words, the Treasury secretary's
determinations can be challenged on legal grounds. The Dodd
It's relatively rare for Congress to pass laws stripping courts of
all power to review actions of administrative agencies. But it
does happen from time to time, and courts have upheld some of
these laws. On the other hand, courts are especially skeptical of
laws that preclude judicial review of claimed violations of
constitutional rights. For example, the Supreme Court's decision
this summer involving the Guantanamo Bay detainees,
Boumediene v. Bush, held that the Bush administration's effort to
deny the detainees access to federal court by taking away their
right to the writ of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. In
Boumediene, the court could rely on specific language in the
Constitution's Suspension Clause, which forbids suspension of
the writ except when "in cases of rebellion or invasion the public
safety may require it."
Secretary Paulson's proposal doesn't mess with habeas corpus.
But its breathtaking sweep would prevent a litigant from raising
constitutional objections to his actions. You could imagine, for
example, a suit claiming that the Treasury Department had
engaged in a taking of property without just compensation or
had deprived people of property without due process of law
(neither is allowed under the Fifth Amendment). Or a litigant
could sue Treasury for acting so arbitrarily or irrationally that his
actions violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
In contrast, Sen. Dodd's proposal includes a well-balanced
provision for judicial review. His proposal would subject the
Treasury secretary to the normal standards customary in
American administrative law. Courts would not be permitted to
substitute their judgment for that of the secretary—that's the part
about how Treasury would only be on the hook for a decision
that was arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion. But
courts could be called upon to police such an abuse or a
departure from the rule of law. That, of course, is their
traditional role.
Those who advocate for a bailout this week often conjure the
dismal economic history of the Great Depression. There's an apt
legal parallel here as well. Many of the early laws passed at the
behest of the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal
were struck down by the Supreme Court precisely because they
violated norms of checks and balances. While we have come to
caricature those Supreme Court decisions as the shortsighted
backlash of nine old curmudgeons who reflexively opposed the
socialistic tendencies of the New Deal, perhaps it is worth
remembering that the constitutional principles they invoked were
grounded in the elemental balance struck by the framers. These
principles are that Congress should pass laws based on
intelligible policy judgments and not (literally) pass the buck to
the executive branch, that executive-branch officials should
administer laws subject to the guidance of Congress, and that
courts exist to review the legitimacy of both.
I do not suggest that it is by any means certain that a court would
strike down the Paulson bill as it's now written. But it is certain
that this bill is in powerful tension with our system of checks
and balances and that its constitutionality would be subject to
grave doubt. Why take a chance? It was a lack of transparency
and accountability that created the crisis in credit markets. That
was itself a departure from the wisdom of the framers. Let's not
depart again.
jurisprudence
Ten To Toss
The Bush executive orders that most deserve to be scrapped.
By Emily Bazelon and Chris Wilson
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 12:58 PM ET
The presidency comes with a superpowered pen for signing
executive orders. Without negotiating with Congress to pass a
law, or even going through the notice-and-comment period that
precedes a new federal rule, the president can change the music
that federal agencies dance to. He's the executive, and it's his
executive branch.
What, then, is the worst of the damage President Bush has
caused all on his own? In putting together a top (or bottom) 10
list from the Bush administration's 262 EOs, we sifted through
some familiar targets, such as his faith-based initiative and
diversion of funds from stem-cell research. We also realize that
some of the Bush moments we rue didn't come in the form of an
executive order. The recent bid to force family-planning clinics
to certify that their employees won't have to assist with any
procedure they find objectionable, for example, took the form of
a federal rule. So did the administration's decisions to open up
new swaths of public land to logging and mining and to raise the
allowable level of mercury emissions.
We'd like to see those rules repealed, too, but we decided to stick
with EOs for this list because of their consoling simplicity. If
they can be conjured by a stroke of the pen, they can also
quickly be made to vanish—presidents show little reluctance to
excise their predecessors' dictums. Here are our picks for the
nine orders most deserving of the presidential eraser come
January. We're taking suggestions to round out our list to 10, so
please send the executive order you hate most, and the reason
you hate it, to JurisprudenceContest@gmail.com.
No. 1: Gutting the Presidential Records Act
Nov. 1, 2001
What the order says: With Executive Order 13233, the Bush
administration tried to gut the Presidential Records Act, passed
in 1978 to make sure that the internal documents of the
executive branch are public and generally will become part of
the historical record. The 1978 law itself was a compromise in
favor of privacy in some respects: Presidential records aren't
disclosed for up to 12 years after an administration leaves office,
and requests for them are subject to the limits imposed by the
Freedom of Information Act, which means that classified
documents stay secret. But the Bush order essentially threw out
the law's bid for transparency altogether. After stonewalling for
months over access to documents from the Reagan era, former
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales drafted an order that gives a
sitting president, or the president whose records are being
requested, the power to review a documents request, with no
time limit. If either president says no, you have to sue to get the
records.
Why it should go: The American Historical Association hates
this order for good reason: It puts a president's interest in
secrecy—to prevent embarrassment, inconvenient revelations,
whatever—over the public's interest in understanding past events
of national import. In 2007, a federal judge struck down part of
EO 13233 for conflicting with the Presidential Records Act—
which trumps a presidential order, since it's a law enacted by
Congress. But parts of the order remain in effect, and a bill in
Congress to scrap the whole thing has stalled. The next president
shouldn't wait for the judiciary or the legislature: He should
throw out this order on his own, as proof that a dozen years after
he leaves office, he won't be afraid of an inside view of his
White House.
No. 2: Blocking Stem-Cell Research
June 20, 2007
What the order says: In August 2001, Bush issued a rule
limiting federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research to
existing colonies of such cells. Five years later, he expended the
first veto of his presidency to reject legislation served up by a
Republican Congress to ease those restrictions. This subsequent
executive order a year later, issued the same day he vetoed the
legislation a second time, encourages research into alternative
measures of creating pluripotent stem cells. The order directs the
Department of Health and Human Services and the National
Institutes of Health to prioritize research consistent with Bush's
previous directives and devote resources to finding other means
of creating human stem cells.
Why it should go: EO 13440 looks like an improvement on
previous directives to the CIA, like the memos from the Justice
Department written by John Yoo, which narrowly defined
torture and Geneva's protections. (According to Barton
Gellman's new book about Cheney, the only technique Yoo
rejected on legal grounds was burying a detainee alive.) Still, the
executive order leaves the door open to techniques that the
United States would not want used against its own soldiers and
so is part of the Bush administration detritus that has damaged
the United States' moral authority abroad. The administration's
record is so tarnished on this score that the next president should
declare that he is scrapping this order, so he can start over and
come up with his own policy on interrogation and the CIA.
No. 4: Handing the Keys to the Vice President
March 25, 2003
Why it should go: Supporting alternative means of creating
stem cells is a fine idea—just not at the expense of supporting
the more immediately available source of stem cells, which are
among the most promising lines of medical research today.
There is certainly hope that the debate over whether to destroy
human embryos to collect these valuable one-size-fits-all cells
will eventually be moot. Researchers have found ways to turn
back the clock on adult skin cells, reprogramming them as
embryonic cells. But this is a tricky process that involves
inserting new genes, and it's not yet a sufficient alternative to
embryonic stem cells. In the meantime, Bush's order is diverting
funds even from research that could eventually sidestep his
ethical concerns; scientists have successfully harvested bone fide
stem cells without harming the nascent embryo. Both McCain
and Obama supported the legislation that would have loosened
Bush's research restrictions when it came before the Senate in
2006 and 2007. While some supporters of embryonic-stem-cell
research have questioned McCain's resolve, his campaign says
his position is unchanged. This order should go no matter who is
elected.
No. 3: Finessing the Geneva Conventions
July 20, 2007
What the order says: After the Supreme Court pushed back
against the Bush administration's efforts to hold the Guantanamo
detainees indefinitely and without charges, doubts arose about
the legality of the CIA's use of coercive interrogation techniques
(or torture, if you think water-boarding amounts to that). For a
time, the CIA's interrogation squeeze was on hold. Then Bush
issued Executive Order 13440, and the interrogators started
rolling again. The order isn't explicit about which practices it
allows—that remains classified—but it may still sidestep the
protections in the Geneva Convention against humiliating and
degrading treatment. According to the New York Times, waterboarding is off-limits, but sleep deprivation may not be, and
exposure to extreme heat and cold is allowed.
What the order says: In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton
issued an executive order that made it easier to declassify
documents, and hundreds of millions of pages of information
about the White House tumbled forth. In 2003, the Bush
administration took another tack, amending Clinton's order to get
the vice president into the business of classifying whatever he
wants. Executive Order 13292 gives the vice president the same
power to classify documents that the president has.
Why it should go: EO 13292 is a twofer: It both expands the
scope of secrecy and the powers of the vice presidency. As
Byron York argues in the National Review, "Since the beginning
of the administration, Dick Cheney has favored measures
allowing the executive branch to keep more things secret. And in
March 2003, the president gave him the authority to do it." This
is reminiscent of Cheney's efforts to prevent the National
Archives and Records Administration from enforcing the rules
that govern classified information as they pertain to the vice
president. Cheney is famous for wanting his office to be a closed
box. Executive Order 13292 looks like it was written expressly
for him. We hope that the next vice president won't also want to
keep secrets to this extent. But the boss should eliminate this
worry by revoking this order.
No. 5: Free Rein in Iraq
May 28, 2003
What the order says: Issued two months after the invasion of
Iraq, this order offers broad legal protection for U.S.
corporations dealing in Iraqi oil. Bush's directive, justified as a
means of protecting Iraqi oil profits, nullifies any sort of judicial
proceedings relating to either Iraqi petroleum or the newly
created Development Fund for Iraq. The executive order also
declares a national emergency to deal with the threat to a
peaceful reconstruction of Iraq, which Bush has renewed every
year since, most recently in May 2008.
Why it should go: This directive is the foundation for all of
Bush's subsequent executive orders on Iraq (see No. 6, below),
so it's the logical place to begin rolling back abuses of authority
relating to the war. Given the many concerns over cronyism and
waste by U.S. contractors in Iraq, revoking their blanket legal
protection when oil is on the table is justified. Watchdog groups
originally feared that the order could be used to prevent people
with tort claims from suing corporations working in Iraq. That
hasn't come to pass so far—Tom Devine, the legal director at the
Government Accountability Project, says he has not seen the
order applied in any legal case. Still, given that the United States
will probably be in Iraq for at least 16 months after the next
president takes office, it's not too late to inject a little
accountability into the contracting. As the Government
Accountability Project wrote at the time, "The scope of the EO's
mandate for lawlessness is limited only by the imagination." The
order is also overkill; the U.N. resolution that passed
concurrently with it, which was hailed as a major diplomatic
victory for the United States and Britain at the time, contains
more limited legal immunity for oil-related commerce in Iraq.
No. 6: Going After Troublemakers in Iraq
July 17, 2007
What the order says: This order grants the administration the
power to freeze the assets of an abstract but broadly defined
group of people who threaten the stability of Iraq. The list of
targeted people includes anyone who has propagated (or helped
to propagate) violence in Iraq in an effort to destabilize the
reconstruction. Most ominously, it also applies to anyone who
poses a "significant risk of committing" a future act of violence
to that end. The order, which applies to anyone in the United
States or in U.S. control abroad, also declares, "Any conspiracy
formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is
prohibited." The order appears to acknowledge that it could
conflict with constitutional protections but then states that
targets of its provisions do not need to be notified ahead of time
that their assets will be frozen.
Why it should go: The Fifth Amendment has a few interesting
things to say about the seizure of property without due process—
namely, you can't do it. While this is far from the first time the
Bush administration has trampled constitutional rights in the
name of national security, this order, if broadly interpreted,
could target war protesters in the United States. Then-White
House spokesman Tony Snow said at the time that it was
intended to target terrorists and insurgents, but the language of
the order is vaguer. This EO drew condemnation from all
ideological directions, from Swift-boater Jerome Corsi to the
ACLU. One needn't be a civil libertarian to see the danger of the
order's loose definitions or wonder why we needed the order in
the first place. Bonus: The next month, Bush issued a similar
order targeting mischief-makers in Lebanon and their supporters.
That one can go, too.
No. 7: Eyes and Ears in the Agencies
Jan. 18, 2007
What the order says: Recent presidents have gone back and
forth over how much control the White House should exert over
writing federal regulations, particularly in contested areas like
environmental policy. Unsurprisingly, Bush came down on the
side of strong White House influence. This order mandates the
designation of a presidential appointee in each federal agency as
"regulatory policy officer," with authority to oversee the rulemaking process. This largely revises Bill Clinton's 1993
executive order granting agencies more regulatory independence
from the White House (which nullified two of Reagan's
executive orders). Defenders contend that it is important for the
administration to be able to balance regulatory policy with
business and economic concerns.
Why it should go: The Bush administration has shown no
qualms about interfering with federal regulations normally left to
civil servants, particularly on environmental fronts like ozone
limits, as Democrats like Rep. Henry Waxman, the chairman of
the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have
pointed out. Repealing the order would be a step toward
scrubbing the agencies of the stench of political tampering. The
next president shouldn't mix political appointees with civil
servants from the inception of the regulatory process by
requiring a company man in each agency to supervise.
No. 8: Letting Religious Groups Call the Hiring Shots
Dec. 12, 2002
What the order says: Adding to the pair of 2001 executive
orders that encouraged religious groups to apply for federal
money for social services, Bush's December 2002 order made it
easier for churches and synagogues to take the money by letting
them skirt certain anti-discrimination laws. Because of this
order, the faith-based groups can take federal funds while
refusing to hire people who aren't of the faith the groups
espouse.
Why it should go: As Timothy Noah pointed out in Slate at the
time, this seems sensible enough at first: "Why shouldn't
government-funded religious charities be allowed to favor
members of their own religion when hiring, firing, and
promoting?" But there are a couple of problems here. The first is
that the groups get to define for themselves who counts as a
good Baptist or a good Jew—and what if they decide someone is
out because he or she is gay, for example? The second problem
is that it's not really clear why Catholic charities should be able
to hire only Catholics to serve meals to the homeless, if that
work is being funded by the government. In a debate on The
NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Christopher Anders of the ACLU
framed the order this way: "What this is about is creating a
special right for some organizations that don't want to comply
with the civil rights protections." James Towey, then director of
the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives, said, "The question is, 'Do they lose right to hire
according to religious beliefs when they take federal money?' "
Either way you frame it, the order is a bad idea. Both John
McCain and Barack Obama have pledged to continue federal
funding of faith-based programs, but Obama has promised that
groups taking the money won't be able to make social-services
hires on the basis of religion.
No. 9: The Alternative-Fuel Fix-All
Jan. 26, 2007
What the order says: Shortly after his 2007 State of the Union
address, in which he devoted significant time to environmental
proposals, Bush signed Executive Order 13423. Among other
things, the order requires federal agencies to cut petroleumbased-fuel usage by 2 percent annually through 2015 while
increasing alternative-fuel use by 10 percent each year. The
order also requires agencies to reduce overall energy
consumption and purchase more hybrid vehicles.
Slate predicts McCain's next 10 Hail Mary stunts.
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 1:39 PM ET
1. Returns to Vietnam and jails himself.
2. Offers the post of "vice vice president" to Warren Buffett.
3. Challenges Obama to suspend campaign so they both can go
and personally drill for oil offshore.
4. Learns to use computer.
5. Does bombing run over Taliban-controlled tribal areas of
Pakistan.
6. Offers to forgo salary, sell one house.
7. Sex-change operation.
8. Suspends campaign until Nov. 4, offers to start being
president right now.
9. Sells Alaska to Russia for $700 billion.
10. Pledges to serve only one term. OK, half a term.
Do you have an idea for McCain's next campaign stunt? Send it
to us at NextMcCainStunt@gmail.com, and we will publish the
best ideas. E-mails may be quoted by name unless you indicate
otherwise.
.
Why it should go: On the face of it, Bush's directive seems like
a step in the right direction. Officials in California, however,
were quick to question the policy's ecological bottom line.
Producing alternative fuels, they argued, can result in a large
spike in greenhouse-gas emissions, particularly when harvesting
resources like oil shale and coal. There's also doubt that the
alternative-fuel industry simply has the capacity to meet the
order's requirements. As the Washington Post editorialized,
"Where might 20 billion alternative-fuel gallons come from?" To
complicate matters, the Supreme Court ruled two months later
that the Environmental Protection Agency does have the
authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,
prompting Bush to issue another executive order directing
several agencies to draft guidelines for reducing emissions from
cars and trucks. The sound, responsible energy policy that
should be at the top of the list for the next president—and
Congress—will need realistic goals and a big-picture
understanding of costs and benefits of alternative fuels.
No. 10:
Got a least-favorite Bush executive order that we missed? Send
your suggestions to JurisprudenceContest@gmail.com. E-mails
may be quoted by name unless you specify otherwise.
low concept
First Palin, Then Campaign Suspension.
What Now?
.
.
map the candidates
One Stumper
Biden is the only one on the trail today, with stops in Pennsylvania. Obama
and McCain are with President Bush in Washington.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 11:47 AM ET
moneybox
Why Congress Is Failing America
The financial catastrophe and the WaMu collapse reveal that Washington
bureaucrats can handle an emergency but politicians can't.
By Daniel Gross
Friday, September 26, 2008, at 9:52 AM ET
Last night, the troubled financial system had to absorb two fresh
blows: the failure of Washington Mutual and the failure of the
White House and Congress to reach a consensus on a proposed
bailout package for banks like Washington Mutual. The big
irony? The failure of a bank with $307 billion in assets, the
largest bank failure ever by far, is causing the tiniest of ripples,
while the failure of business as usual—who could have imagined
that the Bush administration would be unable to bring along its
allies in the House and Senate?—is inducing rage and panic
among CNBC talking heads.
It is a tale of two systems. One system, the one used to process
failed and faltering banks, works really well. It's been in place
and evolving for 75 years, since the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corp. was founded (over the opposition of bankers, it must be
added). Since then, not a penny of depositors' money has been
lost, and the banks continue to insure themselves against their
own incompetence. The FDIC insurance fund contains about $45
billion, and analysts had feared that the failure of a bank the size
of WaMu (it had $188 billion in deposits) would swamp the
fund. But the FDIC has a professional staff, run by a highly
competent and intelligent manager, Sheila Bair. Having already
handled a baker's dozen of failures this year, the FDIC has the
drill down. There are also, thankfully, a few competent bankers
left in the world. Many of them work at J.P. Morgan Chase,
which has agreed to acquire WaMu's business. WaMu's failure
will cause real dislocation—stockholders and many bold-holders
are likely to be wiped out. But WaMu's depositors will be made
whole. The FDIC won't have to dip into the insurance fund. J.P.
Morgan Chase is assuming WaMu's troubled mortgage business.
It will take a charge for those bad debts and raise new capital
from the private sector to deal. It's a big headline and a big story,
but in the scheme of things, a blip. A large boat slipping silently
below the sea while all the passengers escape with their lives.
This system is a force for order.
The other system—the process by which Congress and the
White House make legislation—is an OK system in the best of
times and a completely FUBAR one at the worst. It has many
competent and well-meaning professionals in it. But it also has a
bunch of incompetent malefactors. For the past week, this
system has been lurching toward a proposal to bail out banks by
raising taxpayer funds to purchase bad assets. The plan, released
last Friday, was the brainchild of Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson and was instantly endorsed by President Bush and
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Last weekend,
Congress got involved. And throughout the week, all parties
involved gave the outward impression that they were moving
toward an agreement. On Wednesday, a senior official involved
in the talks assured a group of journalists that the grownups were
in charge. Only they weren't. Democrats, who control Congress,
were unwilling to pass what amounts to a massive tax increase
on their own. Senate Republicans signaled their willingness to
go along, but House Republicans said they wouldn't provide any
votes. Nonetheless, Wednesday night President Bush addressed
the nation, warning of dire consequences unless the bailout plan
was passed. He proclaimed an era of good feeling—"there is a
spirit of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans and
between Congress and this administration"—but didn't seem to
expend much effort whipping House Republicans in line. John
McCain suspended his campaign and parachuted into
Washington, forcing Obama to attend a staged meeting at the
White House. Throughout Thursday, word was leaked that the
contours of a deal had been agreed upon. The markets rallied.
Last night, the word came that there was to be no deal. The
evening ended with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson begging
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to save the economy but conceding
that the real problem was his fellow Republicans. This morning,
the markets were emitting a primal scream. This system is a
force for chaos.
moneybox
The End of the BSD
A Wall Street icon falls.
By Daniel Gross
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET
In New York, happiest among the financial alpha males is the
big swinging dick. The term entered the lingua franca via
Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker. (Relevant quote: "If he could make
millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became that
most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.") BSDs are
the perennial winners of the game of conspicuous earnings (giant
bonuses), conspicuous consumption (giant co-ops and summer
homes), and conspicuous philanthropy (giant plaques on public
edifices). In recent years, with the explosion of wealth triggered
by the credit and housing boom, a large number of BSDs were
minted by the Holy Trinity: hedge funds, private equity, and
investment banking.
Players in these arenas had clearly succeeded in the most
difficult and competitive of environments. But these industries
were all easy-money businesses—great, sexy, and wonderful to
be in when credit is plentiful and cheap but considerably tougher
when the lending climate turns nasty. The dirty little secret of
the late boom? Many of the people who succeeded most
flagrantly did so not because they were great at figuring out
ways to make huge amounts of money. Rather, they scored
because they were great at figuring out ways to make small
amounts of money and then magnified their returns through the
massive use of debt. But now the credit crunch and a new market
and regulatory climate are turning BSDs into NSBSDs (not such
big swinging dicks).
Hedge funds thrived on the use of debt. Find a stock that's doing
well in a bull market, borrow money to buy it, reap outsized
returns when it rises, and keep 20 percent of the returns.
Investment banks eager for stock-trading commissions were
keen to provide the liquidity. Today, not so much. Hedge funds
were willing to use leverage in part because they hedged; they
sold stocks short to protect themselves from being wiped out if
the market moved down. But as part of an effort to protect the
CEOs of financial institutions from their fellow BSDs at hedge
funds, the Securities and Exchange Commission this week
issued an order banning the short selling of several hundred
financial stocks. As a result, many hedge funds are pulling in
their horns and running for safety. As the Financial Times
reported Thursday: "Citigroup estimates that hedge funds have
now placed $600bn in cash, and that $100bn of this is held in
money market funds." The BSDs are investing like grannies who
survived the Great Depression. Riding out the storm by parking
assets in cash is a smart strategy for a hedge fund that has
already scored big gains for the year. But most hedge funds
haven't. Earlier this week, it was reported that, globally
speaking, only one in 10 hedge funds is earning performance
fees—i.e., the 20 percent of the fund's gains that the managers
keep as compensation. Performance fees are what make hedgies
BSDs. (What's 20 percent of nothing? Zero.) Fortress Investment
Group, one of the few publicly held hedge funds, just canceled
its dividend for the third quarter.
Private equity firms, which have a compensation structure
similar to that of hedge funds, have also seen their returns wilt.
During the boom, private equity firms could rack up big gains by
buying a company with little or no money down, and then
having the company issue debt to pay the new owners a healthy
dividend. (They called it investing.) Or they could profit by
selling it to other private equity firms or by selling shares to the
public. Just as homebuyers now must make larger down
payments, private equity firms in the post-credit-boom era have
to pony up more cash to buy firms. Issuing bonds to pay
dividends is passé, and the market for IPOs is limp. The slim list
of recent IPOs is heavy on Asian firms. The upshot: Private
equity firms are having difficulty consummating exit
transactions. In the second quarter, Blackstone reported that
performance fees were actually negative, compared with $453
million in the second quarter of 2007.
Investment banks have suffered a triple whammy. Many of the
biggest of the BSDs, like former Lehman Bros. CEO Richard
Fuld and former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, have seen
their massive fortunes evaporate as their stocks plummeted.
Thousands of lower-level BSDs have suffered alongside them.
(Check out Gabriel Sherman's New York piece on the lament of a
former Lehman Bros. $3 million man.) And there's not much
hope for the near future. Investment banks funded themselves
through the capital markets, which meant they could rack up as
much leverage as the market would permit—up to 25 or 30 times
the amount of capital. Higher leverage means greater returns
when you have a good idea and the climate is forgiving (viz.
2002-06). But it's a killer when the weather turns nasty (viz.
2008). At some investment banks, bonuses this year will be slim
to nonexistent. Earlier this week, Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley, seeking more stability, received permission to transform
themselves into commercial banks. They can now accept
deposits and enjoy regular access to credit from the Federal
Reserve. In return, they'll have to submit to more regulation and
use much less debt in their operations. For decades, investment
bankers looked down on commercial bankers—with their shorter
hours and lower profits and salaries—as nerds, putt-putting
along in Oldsmobiles while the I-bankers drove Ferraris. But
now investment banks will have to operate less like hedge funds
and more like the First National Bank of Podunk, with
commensurate changes in compensation.
Among investment banks, Goldman Sachs was the ultimate big
swinging dick, the firm that could do no wrong, that was more
profitable than anybody else, that was just better. But this week,
Goldman, needing cash, turned to Warren Buffett, the biggest of
the BSDs. He agreed to help but extracted pretty onerous terms:
10 percent annual interest rate plus an equity kicker. In other
words, Goldman is paying a double-digit interest rate and giving
up a piece of the house in exchange for a measly few billion
dollars. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, lord of the
BSDs, is now a subprime borrower.
moneybox
Nice Bailout. Now Pay for It!
Congress and the president favor a $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but they're
afraid to say how they'll pay for it.
By Daniel Gross
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 5:21 PM ET
To spend is to tax, as capitalist deity Milton Friedman is said to
have put it. If so, over the last several months, we've seen an
orgy of tax increases and potential increases. Time was, that
prospect would have set off a revolution.
Consider the spree of actions that have the potential—directly
and indirectly—to cost taxpayers money: the government
accepting $30 billion of Bear Stearns' drecky collateral for a $29
billion loan to JPMorgan, giving investment banks access to the
discount window, assuming responsibility for Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, guaranteeing money market funds (up to $50
billion), making a big loan to AIG (up to $85 billion), and now
proposing the mother of all bailouts—up to $700 billion.
It's difficult to quantify the costs of these activities for a few
reasons. Even though the government has now formally agreed
to guarantee the debt of Fannie and Freddie, the White House
says it doesn't see the necessity—shock me!—to include the cost
of doing so in the budget. In theory, Hank Paulson could drive a
good bargain in buying hundreds of billions of dollars of
distressed assets. As a result, the government could recoup a lot
of the costs of the latest bailout proposal. And most of the other
efforts are loans, which are designed to be paid back. To get a
sense of how good the government thinks the credit risks are, the
Federal Reserve is charging AIG (until last week, a Dow
component) an interest rate of three-month LIBOR plus 8.5
percent—about 11.4 percent. That's a lower rate than many
credit-card customers pay but a higher rate than most junk-rated
companies pay. But it's almost certain that all these bailouts will
cost taxpayers tens of billions, possibly hundreds of billions, of
dollars. Unless the laws of mathematics are repealed, we will
have to pay this money back in the form of higher taxes or lower
government spending.
But have you heard anyone in authority asking about the $700
billion bailout: How do you propose to pay for it?
There seems to be a center-based consensus that some form of
bailout is of vital importance to the nation's economy, to its
image, and to the global financial system. I agree. But important
national projects are worth paying for. Especially when the
projects in question are a sop to an industry that has asked for—
and received—so much from Washington in the past decade.
Think about everything Wall Street has been given since the late
1990s: cuts in the capital-gains tax, dividend tax, and estate tax;
cuts in marginal income tax rates; free-trade agreements; low
interest rates; light regulation. The promise was that doing the
bidding of the financial-services industry would deliver solid
growth and boost incomes for everyone. It didn't. This business
cycle, in which job growth was generally anemic, ended with
median incomes about where they were at the end of the last
business cycle. The S&P 500 is basically where it was 10 years
ago. Sure, we got cheap mortgages, all the credit we could eat,
and some higher corporate income-tax payments for a few years.
But now Wall Street wants it all back in the form of bailouts.
So anybody who pops up on television, or in a congressional
hearing, to talk about the vital necessity of this regrettable
bailout should be asked to give a sense of how much it might
cost and then to come up with a way to pay for it. Two-hundredbillion dollars? Fine, please delineate $200 billion in spending
cuts over the next two years or $200 billion in tax increases to
pay to clean up your mess. Which Cabinet-level agency should
be zeroed out? Which benefits programs cut? Which component
of the defense budget gutted? I'd love to hear what former
Lehman Bros. CEO Richard Fuld, or President Bush (who
continues to cower behind Paulson's large frame), or Goldman
Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Morgan Stanley CEO John
Mack, whose butts were just saved, have to propose. After all,
every dollar spent by the taxpayers cleaning up Wall Street's
mess is one more added to the massive and expanding deficit,
one more dollar that will have to be paid back with interest.
There are some ideas out there. Jesse Eisinger of Portfolio has
floated a tax on securities transactions. Another possibility
would be to make the bailed-out companies self-insure against
their own incompetence, the way banks have done with the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. And, of course, Congress
should abolish the exemption that allows private-equity and
hedge-fund managers to pay low capital-gains-tax rates for the
money they earn managing other people's money.
It may seem silly to ask about the long-term budgetary
implications of bailouts in the time of an emergency. When a
fire engine is racing toward a four-alarm blaze, nobody stops to
worry that speeding will put wear and tear on the engine. And
what's another few hundred billion dollars of debt on top of a
national debt that already reaches $9.7 trillion? But to not ask
this question would be acting recklessly with other people's
money. Which is how we got into this mess in the first place.
Send your suggestions for how to pay for the bailout to
Moneybox@slate.com, and we'll publish some of the best. Emails may be quoted by name unless the writer specifically
requests otherwise.
movies
Choke
Gag.
By Dana Stevens
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 6:07 PM ET
Thank God we have another film about the fantasies, hang-ups,
unintentional cruelties, and eventual redemption of a fucked-up
straight white guy. For a moment there, I had almost forgotten to
keep such dudes at the forefront of my concerns. But when
Chuck Palahniuk—the cult author of Fight Club and the novel
that inspired Clark Gregg's Choke (Fox Searchlight)—is on the
premises, self-destructive, Oedipally fixated slackers everywhere
can rest safe in the knowledge that at last they have a voice in
pop culture.
OK, that was an ungenerous lede. But movies like Choke are just
as ungenerous to their viewers, keeping us at arm's length with a
barrage of non sequiturs and artfully contrived affectlessness and
then expecting us to whip out our hankies for a sincere
emotional climax. I walked out of Choke feeling hustled, which
is appropriate enough, I guess, for a movie that's a portrait of a
compulsive hustler.
Victor (Sam Rockwell) attends a 12-step group for sex
addiction, frequently stepping out of meetings to furtively bang a
fellow addict (Paz de la Huerta). He pays for the hospitalization
of his aging and demented mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), with a
humiliating day job at a colonial theme park where he pitches
hay while wearing a tricorn hat. And as a moneymaking sideline,
he fakes choking in upscale restaurants in the hope that some
benevolent bystander will perform the Heimlich maneuver and
then take him under his or her financial wing. Every bad
decision Victor makes in the present (that is to say, pretty much
everything he does) is linked, via flashback, to its equal and
opposite childhood trauma. His mother, a sociopathic self-styled
radical, once saved him from choking to death in a diner; hence,
he now finds emotional fulfillment in re-enacting the choking
scene.
music box
The only bright spots in Victor's grubby hand-to-mouth
existence come from his desultory friendship with an equally
sex-crazed co-worker Denny (Brad William Henke) and from
the blessed oblivion of orgasm. So when the pretty new doctor
on his mother's psych ward, Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald),
takes an interest in Ida's case, Victor is intrigued—especially
when Paige reveals a crackpot treatment plan that involves
impregnating herself with Victor's sperm.
Here we are eight years into a new century, high time to start
looking back at the last century and asking what the hell that
was about. Critic Alex Ross, in his best-selling book The Rest Is
Noise, takes a long, hard squint at musical Modernism in its
context, by way of what he calls "the 20th century heard through
its music." If Ross doesn't come up with a lot of answers, he
gives us a comprehensive survey and an outstanding read—and,
in the process, suggests a new and commonsensical approach to
a vertiginous subject.
All this is handled in a tone of deadpan grotesquerie that must, I
suppose, be straining to imitate the voice of Palahniuk's book.
The funniest scenes take place at the theme park, where Victor
and Denny's tight-ass manager, Lord High Charlie (played by
the film's writer-director, Clark Gregg), upbraids his wayward
employees in faux olde English. But that mood translates poorly
to the scenes at the hospital ward in which Victor tries to trick
the increasingly forgetful Ida into revealing the true identity of
his father. Anjelica Huston continues to polish her gift (last seen
in The Darjeeling Limited) for transcending subpar material. But
the subject matter—a bad mother sinking into oblivion as her
long-neglected son awaits some sign of her love—is simply too
raw and painful for the cutesy treatment it's given here. Gregg
isn't above the egregious directorial sin of cutting rhythmically
back and forth between two characters as they exchange rapidfire banter: "I was clawed." (Cut.) "Clawed?" (Cut.) "By a lynx."
(Cut.) "Lynx?" (Cut.)
Sam Rockwell, with his melancholy eyes and faintly rodentlike
handsomeness, may be the only actor around who could invest a
character this seedy with such pathos and wit. It's a role that a
generation ago would have gone to Dustin Hoffman. As for poor
Kelly Macdonald, she's become the go-to actress for casting
directors in search of a slightly unhinged saint. Not one of
Paige's motivations—and hence, not one of Macdonald's line
readings—makes sense. A last-minute plot twist all but
eviscerates any sympathy we've managed to work up for the
character, and the guiding assumption that Paige and Victor are
damaged soul mates seems to have been grafted on from a
different, more sentimental movie. Choke's raunchy humor and
narrative weirdness, amply showcased in the red-band trailer,
may find it a cult audience. But viewers in search of a few
harmless masturbation and anal-bead jokes may resent being
dragged along on Victor's journey to wholeness.
The Big Rewind
How The Rest Is Noise changes our understanding of 20th-century music.
By Jan Swafford
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 1:55 PM ET
The 20th century was the most healthy, comfy, democratic,
generally advanced period in history, and also the most
murderous and totalitarian, both largely thanks to science and
technology at the service of ideologies. Revolutions in politics
and technology were paralleled by revolutions in the arts—or,
rather, an ebb and flow of revolution and retrenchment that made
up the patchwork we still call Modernism.
In his book, Ross doesn't attempt a grand unified theory of
Modernism, and that's probably wise. The century was a maze of
crosscurrents. In 1912, Igor Stravinsky took music into a
sophisticated neoprimitive frenzy in Le sacre du printemps; after
WWI he went back to Mozart, in his fashion. Legions of
composers followed each of those directions. Arnold
Schoenberg blew up the last of the old harmonic system based
on seven-note scales and, likewise after the war, replaced it with
his own system based on the 12-tone chromatic scale. Béla
Bartók drew from both Schoenberg and Stravinsky and folded
those influences into his native Hungarian voice, forming a
highly personal back-to-the-folk, back-to-nature kind of
Modernism, in some respects so old it was new. Schoenberg's
pupil Anton Webern made his teacher's system still more
systematic; for many after WWII, Webern seemed to take music
to a plane of ethereal intellect that formed some kind of answer
to madness and conflagration. After Schoenberg died,
meanwhile, Stravinsky took up his rival's 12-tone method and
thereby insured its triumph in the academy if not in the concert
hall. So, in music as in the other arts, the 20 th century spread out
in a series of contrarieties: futurism and primitivism, hyperstructure and chance, ultracomplexity and minimalism, shockthe-bourgeoisie art and Pop Art.
As of the second half of the century, Stravinsky, Schoenberg,
and Bartók made up the holy trinity of musical Modernism, with
Webern as chief prophet. There was a certain logic to that
grouping. Schoenberg and Stravinsky formed opposing camps,
the Viennese master perceived by critics as representing a
rationalized, atonal, dissonant, public-be-damned aesthetic,
while Stravinsky both in his neoprimitive and neoclassic veins
was more sonically gorgeous, more tonal, and more
communicative. (In later years, both men tried to paint
themselves as traditionalists, but few paid attention.) The public
embraced Bartók more slowly than it did Stravinsky, but he
wrote some populist pieces (including the Concerto for
Orchestra), and, however dissonant, etc., Bartók had a
compelling rhythmic energy.
Webern was more removed from the mainstream than those
three, but he had enormous influence on composers. John Cage
was the wild card of the second half of the century. Cage
unleashed, as Ross puts it, "the imp of chance" with works like
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios (playing whatever
happens to be on), and 4'33" for a pianist playing nothing for
that period of time (the "music" is the squirming and annoyed
muttering of the audience). Cage wanted to overthrow the
aesthetics and ideologies of past centuries, and by implication
the catastrophes they enabled in the 20th, by erasing the very
ideas of "purpose" and "meaning" in art.
That historians settled on this group of superstars came from the
critical tendency of the Modernist period to rate artists by the
size of the bombs they tossed into tradition. Schoenberg and
Stravinsky achieved fame via bloody audience riots; Bartók was
branded a "barbarian." So, when it came time for critics and
historians to judge the popular acceptance of musical
Modernism, their mind-set said that innovation was the prime
criterion. Schoenberg's public acceptance or lack thereof became
the main litmus test for the acceptance of all 20 th-century music.
By that test, it hasn't succeeded too well. I've seen Schoenberg
performances get standing ovations in Boston Symphony Hall,
but on the whole, 57 years after Schoenberg's death, the
mainstream concertgoing public remains wary of him.
Following that group of superstars, critical consensus decreed a
mass of composers both radical and conservative who were in
effect historical also-rans, even if they had significant influence
and/or simply wrote broadly appealing music: Berg and
Shostakovich, Ives and Sibelius, Ligeti and Britten, Babbitt and
Reich, et al. (In some ways, Claude Debussy was the father of
them all.)
How does The Rest Is Noise make sense of all this? Alex Ross
doesn't try to. Instead, as a critic and historian contemplating a
noisy century, he looks intensely at individuals, at particular
composers reflecting, riding, sometimes bucking the currents of
culture and history around them: Stravinsky in Paris and
America, Schoenberg in Vienna and America. Perhaps the
book's most memorable chapter is "The Art of Fear: Music in
Stalin's Russia," which examines a period when producing an
obscure sonnet or an atonal sonata could earn you a bullet in the
head. Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich are the focus of
this chapter, but Shostakovich is the hero: a genius of radical
inclinations who was brought to heel by the Soviets. Through the
Stalinist decades, Shostakovich had to compose as best he could,
advancing here and accommodating there, all the while waiting
for the knock on the door. Ross makes sure we understand what
that cost him. After publicly reciting an absurd self-denunciation
in 1948, Shostakovich shrieked to friends: "I read like the most
paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a
string!"
In the process of laying out his history in sound, Ross fashions
what amounts to a tacit revisionist picture, a small quiet
revolution of his own. He gives the traditional trinity of
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók their due, both historically
and technically, likewise other important figures like Webern
and Cage. But the longest and warmest chapters in Ross' book
concern the late-Romantic Finn Jean Sibelius and the eclectic
but mostly tonal Brit Benjamin Britten. Those two and
Shostakovich form a sort of counter-trinity in Ross' book: three
composers who bucked the Modernist narrative that revolution is
the name of the game, who wrote much of the time in traditional
genres however personalized, and who were some of the most
crowd-pleasing of 20th-century composers.
I asked Ross if he had intended a strike at the old consensus. The
answer was: not exactly as such. "My plan all along," he replied,
"was to write a book that would encompass both the Modernist
revolution and those composers who fell outside of Modernism's
conventional lineage. I didn't plan on supplanting the hierarchy
that already existed (if I were capable of such a thing), but,
rather, to supplement it. So, I see the century in terms of
Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók AND Sibelius, Shostakovich,
Britten, AND—very central to me—Berg and Messiaen." Ross
adds that the view of the Modern period, or any period, can't be
summarized in only a few figures: "When we talk about 19 thcentury music, we don't try to boil it down to three composers. I
don't know if anyone with a straight face would say that the
major composers of the 19th century were, say, Beethoven,
Verdi, and Wagner ...What about Schubert? Brahms? Berlioz?
Etc. It should be the same with the 20th century."
Which I second. Why only a few superstars? Why should
Schoenberg be a litmus test? To see the arts of any century in a
mature perspective, we need to disengage ourselves from the
ideologies and polemics of the period. In the later 19 th century,
for example, there was a full-scale war between the radicals
lined up behind Wagner and the conservatives behind Brahms.
Today those two composers happily coexist in concert halls, and
we don't judge them through that lens.
Music of the 20th century is as vital a part of the classical
repertoire, including the most popular repertoire, as the music of
any other period. The reality in the concert hall has long been
that a lot of composers from the 20th century are played and
appreciated. I remember my shock some 25 years ago at a
concert in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn., when an
audience went nuts (in a good way) over the Bartók Third Piano
Concerto—and, for good measure, welcomed a new piece of
mine. As best I can tell, most concertgoers don't blanch over
Sibelius or Prokofiev, and Shostakovich is on a roll. I attended
two years of Schoenberg-themed programs from the Boston
Symphony and didn't see masses leaving in a huff. And
remember that Rachmaninoff and Gershwin were 20 th-century
composers. If they didn't invent any systems, if they didn't "free
music," if they didn't "teach us to listen in a new way," so what?
How interesting, fresh, moving, and true are their notes?
So, as part of his look over the 20th century, Alex Ross snuck his
own bomb into the historical narratives that have clouded our
vision of the Modernist period. When the pieces come down and
the air clears, we've got a bunch of splendid music to come to
terms with from our own perspectives. The Rest Is Noise is a
major step in that direction.
other magazines
Bailout Blues
The New Yorker, New York, and Harper's on the Wall Street rescue plan.
By Kara Hadge
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 11:30 AM ET
The New Yorker, Sept. 29
A feature chronicles a Marine's struggle with PTSD, which led
to his suicide and the death of his brother. After completing one
tour of duty in Afghanistan and four in Iraq, Travis Twiggs set
out for the Grand Canyon with his brother Willard, who faced
problems of his own with drugs and alcohol. In "a landscape
suited to an apocalyptic frame of mind," they tried—
unsuccessfully—to drive into the canyon. A police chase two
days later culminated in the deaths of both brothers. … Another
piece delves into the details of Leona Helmsley's will and takes
up broader questions about the moral implications of
bequeathing billions of dollars to animals. Helmsley's wish to
leave $12 million to her Maltese, Trouble, and the vast majority
of her estate to establishing a trust intended to aid other dogs
"reflects contempt for humanity as much as love of dogs."
New York, Sept. 29
The cover story views the financial crisis vis-à-vis It's a
Wonderful Life, casting Ron Hermance, "the CEO of the
homegrown Hudson City Bancorp," in the role of George Bailey
and Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. as "the vicious, scheming Mr.
Potter." It pushes the analogy to explain how "some dinky local
savings and loan is now the darling of high finance, and the old,
storied banks are falling by the wayside." … A profile spotlights
Alexis Stewart, Martha's daughter, who "has opinions about
pretty much everyone and everything, almost uniformly
negative," and shares them each morning during her Sirius radio
talk show, Whatever With Alexis and Jennifer. Now Alexis and
co-host Jennifer Koppel Hutt are hitting the small screen with
Whatever, Martha!, in which the pair "watch old episodes of
Martha Stewart Living … and make merciless fun of" Alexis'
mom, who is "both executive producer and creator" of the radio
show.
Newsweek, Sept. 29
Fareed Zakaria praises last week's government intervention in
the economic crisis. After taking over AIG, the Bush
administration and the Federal Reserve made recovery possible
by first aiming "to bolster confidence." The point of government
intervention, Zakaria argues, is to balance "good regulations that
allow markets to work well" and the risks inherent in a marketdriven economy. … Another article argues that in the upcoming
presidential debates, "what matters when it comes to foreign
affairs is not so much knowledge … as judgment." Because
international crises usually occur without advance warning—as
in the case of this summer's conflict in Georgia—a competent
president need not know the details of every tension in the
international community. Instead, his overall foreign-policy
"philosophy" should be suited to dealing with problems as they
unfold.
The Weekly Standard, Sept. 29
The cover story wonders whether we're headed for a depression
and determines that "this is hardship, not the privations of the
1930s." The original rules of the board game Monopoly,
invented during the Great Depression, put our contemporary
attitudes into perspective after the boom times of the 1990s. …
Another article examines the shifting position of Catholic
politicians on abortion over the last four years. While John Kerry
attempted to align his views on abortion "with the liberalism" of
the post-Vatican II Church, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have
adopted "the notion that Catholic officials must resist Catholic
teaching, since opposition to abortion is inherently religious—a
matter solely of narrow sectarian definition, like not eating meat
on Fridays." Democrats risk alienating Catholic voters in an
election year in which "the Catholic position [on abortion] is
firmer in the public's mind."
New Republic, Oct. 8
The cover story explains why the McCain "campaign's strategy
of persistent dishonesty" could help him win the election.
Although stretching the truth is a campaign mainstay, "McCain's
untruths … defy any modern historical precedent." While
McCain's sense of honor has long been his most notable
strength, his campaign against a candidate whose "two principal
political weaknesses [are] his race and his lack of experience"
has left him with no choice but to attack "a pretend Obama."
McCain might be onto something—studies show that untruths
leave more of an impact on voters than lies that have been
corrected. … An article debunks "the idea that we are a nation of
small towns." Despite Sarah Palin's appeals to a collective sense
of "nostalgia" for small-town America, it is the metropolitan area
that forms the basis of the U.S. economy and has "increasingly
come to symbolize connectedness."
Harper's, October 2008
In the cover story, the author accompanies his father to help
"trash out" abandoned foreclosed homes by cleaning them up
and ridding them of the "gadgets and notes and utility bills and
photographs" left behind. In doing so, he "can't help but read a
narrative in what has been discarded" by trying to piece together
clues from the previous tenants' lives. The author says he came
to "understand the depth of this crisis in a way that business
pages failed to convey." … In another article, a white actor
heads to Bombay, India, to break into the Bollywood film
industry, where he has been told studios are clamoring for
Westerners. It turns out his pale skin is not an automatic golden
ticket to stardom, but he eventually lands a bit part in a noir film.
poem
"Though Your Sins Be Scarlet"
By David Biespiel
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 6:42 AM ET
Listen to David Biespiel read .
It didn't start with the phenobarbitol or the reefer,
The ironweed or the magnetic force of a gentle woman.
It started with a voice saying return that I could not hear,
And the nineteen Amidahs did nothing for transgressions.
Scarletted-up—all those years—I fiddled and giggled
And got muscle-bound as a deaf dreamer, a striper,
A pressed-against pirate, got teary and ripe with the scuttled
Worry coming back again and again, and no winners
To speak of, no vintage TV to settle in with like sins
Of the zodiacal light or kissing cousins or crummy laws.
I haven't been called a weak sister, and I don't mean to, that's
plain.
But the rummy tumblers, the bloody knuckles, I'll crawl
For them. I'll crawl. And the cutting up and the swear words—
Such crimson no wool can wrap around. Look unto the lamp
black
And see givers and campy gents and you'll forgive anything
hard.
I have. Remember? It was just after she left, burning the last
wick.
politics
Debate Thyself
How candidates are defined before they take the stage.
By John Dickerson
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 7:14 PM ET
The presidential debates have the feel of a boxing match: Two
candidates trade blows across a carpeted stage with a moderator
on hand to keep it clean. Despite the fight-night feel, though, a
candidate's biggest opponent in these debates is often himself.
Looking back over the televised debates since 1960, I find that
the memorable moments are largely the product of story lines
about the candidates that take hold before he ever sets foot on
the stage.
Slate V: John Dickerson looks back at some magic moments
from past debates.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter took a hit because he mentioned that he'd
asked his daughter, Amy, about the biggest trouble facing the
country (she said nuclear weapons). Why did this matter?
Because the rap against Carter was that he was an aimless
leader. By turning to his daughter for advice, he confirmed
impressions that he was a grasping chief executive. When
Michael Dukakis gave a reasonable but dispassionate answer to
a question about whether he would seek the death penalty for a
theoretical rapist of his wife, it confirmed the cartoon of him as a
passionless clerk. When George H.W. Bush looked at his watch
(twice) during a town hall debate in 1992, it locked in his image
as a president who didn't much want to bother with the problems
of regular folk. The list goes on.
The story line that exists before the candidate starts talking can
also help him. The worry about John Kennedy was that he might
be too inexperienced. When he presented himself as a confident
man in control of his facts, facing the camera and directly
addressing the audience, he carried himself in a way that
addressed those doubts. In 1980 Reagan replied, "There you go
again" in response to an attack by Jimmy Carter, and it
inexplicably was big news. The AP wire story about the debate
put it nearly at the top of the piece. Reagan's little quip was
considered important because it showed voters who thought he
might be scary that he was avuncular. He also made Carter look
unfair and icy.
So, what story lines do Barack Obama and John McCain have to
overcome and confirm?
Barack Obama faces the Kennedy test: Can he come across as
commanding? He's a good performer, yes, but will he touch
people in a direct way that goes beyond delivering his lines
well? Obama outpolls John McCain on most attributes, but
voters still worry about his ability to be commander in chief. In
the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, only 48 percent of
the country said he would be effective in that role. For many
voters, this will be their first extended viewing of Obama. His
performance in the debate may go a long way toward helping
them decide whether he's the kind of guy who can pull off all
he's promised both in his economic and foreign policies.
For McCain, the first challenge is to show up. That might help
him avoid the first trap that the Obama campaign has been
laying for him: portraying him as reckless. On Wednesday, Joe
Biden attacked McCain not just as a man with bad ideas but as a
man with dangerously bad ideas—suggesting he lacks the
temperament for the job. McCain's suspension of his campaign,
and his threat (still open as of this writing) to skip the debate,
added some new talking points for Obama aides who wanted to
make this case. This may make it difficult for McCain to assert
his arguments against Obama too directly for fear of looking too
tightly wound.
The other trap Obama has been preparing for McCain is to
portray him as out of touch. Much of the debate will be about
economic issues, potentially dangerous turf for McCain. If he
has another moment when he declares the fundamentals of the
economy as sound, he'll be in trouble. Then again, the
expectations are so low for McCain on the economy that if he
shows just a little mastery—speaking casually about credit
default swaps, for example, or, even better, showing some fellow
feeling with those who are suffering—it may well be enough.
McCain's other challenge is to find a way to use the debate to
meet one of his key campaign goals: proving to voters who want
change that he can actually deliver. His campaign has accepted
that the election will likely be determined by the candidate who
can convince voters he is capable of changing Washington.
That's why both Palin and McCain use the word maverick so
often when talking about themselves. But that assertion has not
worked. McCain trails Obama by more than 30 percentage
points when voters are asked which candidate can better bring
change.
How he does this is not exactly clear. One long-shot theory
would be to embrace his current campaign stunt and make the
policy case for it. McCain's aides insist that he wasn't just
grandstanding by "suspending" his campaign and rushing to
Washington but that he had to make the trip to persuade
Republicans to back some kind of deal. Maybe he could explain
his recent swerve directly to voters and show how it is a model
for the kind of shake-up he'll bring to Washington. Or maybe
simply failing to show up would be the clearest indication
possible of just how determined he is to shake things up.
politics
Sarah Palin's Media Training
What the governor should do next time she's in the hot seat.
By Christopher Beam
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 6:51 PM ET
Sarah Palin likes to talk about how she's not part of the
Washington media elite. It shows.
In her first interview, with ABC's Charlie Gibson, she blanked
when asked about the Bush doctrine (and her unfamiliarity
seemed to be with the phrase itself, not its meaning). Her sitdown with Fox's Sean Hannity was convincingly compared to an
infomercial. And in her latest face-to-face, with Katie Couric of
CBS, she looked like a high-schooler trying to B.S. her way
through a book report.
None of the interviews has been a total disaster. It's more like a
constant low hum of mediocrity. But now that she's been on TV
a few times, there's enough source material to see what she's
doing well—and what she could do better. We asked a few
professional media trainers—people who get paid to coach TV
guests—to analyze Palin's performances and offer a few tips.
(The trainers work mostly with corporate clients but have also
worked with politicians, whom they declined to name. "I don't
train and tell," said one.)
Give details. When Couric asked Palin if she'd considered
freezing home foreclosures as part of the bailout, Palin pulled
back the scope: "It's going to be a multifaceted solution that has
to be found here." She tends to favor "all of the above" solutions
that "keep all options on the table." Great, but anyone can say
that. "The two best words you can say in interviews are for
example," says media trainer Kathy Kerchner, an Arizona-based
consultant who advises corporate and government officials. The
most awkward moment of the CBS interview came when Couric
asked for an example of McCain pushing for government
regulation. Acceptable answers would have included lobbying
reform, campaign-finance reform, or immigration reform.
Instead, Palin said she'd get back to her. So maybe the
prerequisite piece of advice here would be "Know details."
Don't repeat yourself so much. In the Couric interview, Palin
mentioned "shoring up" the economy at least five times, "crisis
mode" at least three times, and twice how the financial
meltdown makes her "ill." The first time you hear a phrase, it
sounds original. The 10th time, it sounds painfully rehearsed.
Media trainer Carmie McCook, director of a D.C.-based firm
that has advised UPS and Pfizer, tells clients to shake it up:
"Here's your key message—now think of three ways to say it."
And that doesn't mean changing your tone of voice. When
Couric asked about McCain aide Rick Davis' connection to
Fannie Mae, Palin said Davis "recused himself from the dealings
in that firm." When Couric repeated herself, so did Palin, only
this time she emphasized different syllables: "He recused
himself from the dealings." Some media trainers encourage
candidates to repeat themselves. (Advertisers used to say you
need to hear something seven times before you remember it and
12 times before you act on it.) But too much and it sounds like
cant.
Don't repeat yourself so much. See above.
Tell stories. Even if you don't have a perfect answer to the
question, you can at least tell a good story. Mike Huckabee is the
gold standard of "Oh, that reminds me" yarns. McCain himself is
also a master spinner. If you can credibly launch into a great
tale, however tangential, it pulls the interview back onto your
own turf. Plus, it buys you time in case the interviewer asks a
follow-up. So when Gibson asked her what she thought of the
Bush doctrine, Palin could have said, "Well, Charlie, I was just
discussing doctrine the other day with my preacher, who told me
a great story about …" You get the idea.
No more "I'll get back to you." Voters like it when politicians
are honest, even if it means momentary embarrassment. But you
can say, "In what respect, Charlie?" only so many times. Next
time she doesn't understand a question, Palin should try to
answer to the best of her abilities, says Mike Bako of Media
Training Worldwide, whose clients include Bank of America,
UCLA, and the Osmond family. Because now is when the "3
a.m. phone call" analogies begin. "In a leadership setting, getting
back to you isn't enough," Bako says.
Catchphrases are overrated. The campaign message may be
that John McCain is a maverick. You may think John McCain is
a maverick. And John McCain may in fact be a maverick. But
when Couric points out that for 26 years, McCain "has almost
always sided with less regulation," you do not say, "He's also
known as the maverick, though." It sounds like a fall-back sound
bite, says Kerchner. Plus, it cheapens the phrase, which in other
contexts might be meaningful. Likewise, when invited to
describe why you're ready to be vice president—or, potentially,
president—don't just keep saying, "I'm ready."
Relax. Media trainers think Palin needs to chill out. "She's trying
a little too hard to sound strong," says McCook. Visually, she's
perfect, says Kerchner. She nails posture, eye contact, and tone
of voice. But it's the verbal aspect—what Palin might call her
"verbage"—that needs work. Sentences that aren't just
declarative but overly decisive—"We must not blink, Charlie"—
sound almost Bush-like. And some phrases, good on paper,
come out sounding stilted in person. "She's been a little too
coached," McCook says. "You gotta make it your own."
Don't be afraid to disagree with McCain. Palin's best moment
with Charlie Gibson was when she told him that she and McCain
simply disagree on drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife
Reserve, says Aileen Pincus of the Pincus Group, which advises
AOL, Microsoft, and the Washington Post. (Slate is owned by
the Washington Post Co.) "That was the one moment where I
thought we saw just a glimpse of Sarah Palin," says Pincus.
Disagreeing occasionally works because it shows you're thinking
for yourself, not just repeating stock campaign phrases.
The No. 1 piece of advice for interviewees, as with all things,
was, practice. But aside from her friendly chat with Hannity,
Palin hasn't been able to warm up. And giving fewer interviews
all but guarantees that each one will get analyzed down to the
molecular level. "They're doing a tremendous disservice by not
putting her out there," says McCook.
This advice doesn't just apply to interviews. It's even more
important for the vice-presidential debate, where dancing around
questions is more difficult than usual. If the moderators don't
challenge you, your opponent will.
politics
Stunt Man
John McCain's latest crazy, brilliant, desperate campaign tactic.
By John Dickerson
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 9:23 PM ET
John McCain has launched his second Hail Mary pass in a
month. On Wednesday he called for a suspension of the
presidential campaign—no events, no ads, and no debate
Friday—so that he and Barack Obama can head to Washington
to forge a bipartisan solution. Even more than his selection of
Sarah Palin as running mate, this gambit feels like a wild
improvisation someone in the McCain team mapped out on his
chest: OK, you run to the fire hydrant, cut left, and then when he
gets to the Buick, John, you heave it.
It's not clear what, exactly, McCain is going to do in
Washington. He doesn't sit on any of the relevant committees,
and everyone is already deep in negotiations. Still, he's coming
anyway. It doesn't make much logical sense. The only way to
understand it is politically: In a presidential campaign, the surest
sign that a candidate is playing politics on an issue is when he
claims not to be playing politics on an issue. The only way for
McCain to convince everyone that his intentions are 100 percent
pure is for him to drop out of the race completely. A campaign
doesn't end—and its distracting affects don't disappear—just
because one candidate says so.
It's hard to believe that McCain's actions would pass his own
laugh test. In fact, he's often snickered at his fellow senators who
come in at the eleventh hour to lend a hand after McCain has
done the hard work. But the McCain campaign is past caring
about how journalists (or colleagues) view his moves. He hopes
the rest of the country will see this as a leadership moment.
McCain needed to do something. He is slipping in the polls both
nationally and in the battleground states. He's playing on
Obama's turf in his effort to sell himself both as a change agent
and as a steward of the economy. When voters are asked which
candidate represents change, Obama beats McCain by more than
30 percentage points. When they're asked which candidate they
trust to handle the economy, he beats McCain almost as handily.
Plus, congressional Democrats were making mischief, arguing
that unless McCain joined in supporting the package it would
fail.
What was a candidate to do in that instance? Issue a press
release? Come up with a better 10-point plan? (An 11-point
plan?) Chanting "Drill, baby, drill" won't help. McCain's
argument is that he represents something other than politics as
usual, and this gambit certainly isn't usual. (Though I was
reminded of Bob Dole's effort to shake up his 1996 campaign by
stepping down from the Senate. There just aren't that many
things a presidential candidate can do that suggest boldness.)
McCain's maneuver might look phony—but then, he and Obama
have been engaging in phony activities since this financial crisis
hit. Both candidates have been huddling with economic brains,
as if they were already a government in waiting. They've both
tried to act in ways that help voters see them as competent crisis
managers. Perhaps McCain will help us define that line between
the charades that voters allow and those they think are
ridiculous, but he got an assist from the president. Bush called
for a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders and for
McCain and Obama to talk about the crisis. Obama had to
accept, a tacit buy-in into the McCain strategy. McCain and
Obama also issued a joint statement calling for bipartisan
cooperation. (Obama's appended the plan he wanted McCain to
agree to in the joint statement; McCain issued just the threeparagraph statement.)
So even if McCain has to spend the next several days defending
his motivations, he may be able to do so at least partially on his
terms. Voters might see it as a transparent political act, or they
might just hear "McCain takes bold action in response to crisis."
Obama talks about getting people in a room to forge consensus,
but he can't match McCain's record—which McCain will happily
talk about when people challenge his authenticity. Of course, the
big downside for McCain is that he's now in the thick of a debate
on a topic (economics) that he's not so comfortable with and that
voters don't intrinsically trust him on.
In response to McCain, Obama pointed out that he had actually
started the bipartisan ball rolling, reaching out to McCain
privately earlier in the day to issue a joint statement. McCain
then one-upped him and went public. (Historians of the
relationship between the two men will note that their first fracas
in 2006 came in a nearly identical situation, though the roles
were reversed: McCain thought he was working out a private
deal with Obama over lobbying reform until Obama appeared to
outflank him in his public posture. McCain and his staff went
ballistic.)
Obama declined to suspend his campaign and said he was
planning to participate in the Friday debate. What the country
needs, he said, quite reasonably, was a vigorous presidential
debate on just this set of issues. Obama aides also argued that
McCain was not only being transparently political, but reckless.
Imagine what that recklessness would be like if McCain were in
the Oval Office, they say. On Wednesday Joe Biden had already
given a speech framing McCain as risky and dangerous as
commander-in-chief in the hopes of planting that story line
before the first debate.
Whether McCain's crazy gambit is seen as desperate or brilliant,
it doesn't matter. Either way, it's probably not the last. The
beneficial effects of the Palin Hail Mary lasted only a few
weeks, and another adrenaline injection was needed. If this one
doesn't work, that's OK—in due time they can try another razzledazzle play. And if it does work, that's great—in due time they
can still try another razzle-dazzle play. It all makes the prospect
of a McCain White House very exciting. So exciting, he might
want to schedule periodic suspensions of his presidency to get
anything done.
politics
Biden's Gaffe Immunity
He misspeaks so often, it's hardly news—and hardly damaging.
By Christopher Beam
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 3:48 PM ET
When Joe Biden described an Obama ad attacking John
McCain's inability to use a computer as "terrible," the world
acted as if the Joe-pocalypse had finally arrived. Jonathan
Martin of Politico called it "perhaps his most off-message
statement yet." Newsday dubbed him "gaffe-a-minute Joe."
National Review's Victor Davis Hanson said it raised "serious
concern whether Biden is up to the job."
Please. Biden's blunder couldn't matter less. Not because gaffes
never matter—they can, if they play into public perceptions of
the candidate's character—but because Joe Biden is gaffe-proof.
Whatever traps he sets for himself, however many minorities he
offends, he always seems to wriggle out. It's almost as if, by
committing so many gaffes, he has become immune to their
effects. "Joe Biden Makes Gaffe" is the new "Dog Bites Man."
In the past week, Biden hasn't disappointed. When the federal
government announced the AIG bailout, Biden said it was a bad
idea. (The official campaign stance at the time was neither
support for nor opposition to the bailout; Obama gently chided
Biden for going off-message.) In Ohio, Biden said he's against
clean-coal technology. (That was his stance in the primaries, not
Obama's current stance.) And in an interview with Katie Couric,
he said that when the markets crashed in 1929, "Franklin
Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the
princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.' " (FDR
wasn't president then, nor did television exist.)
As a result, the Obama/Biden campaign was on alert Tuesday.
Biden addressed a crowd of about 150 at a community center in
Woodbridge, Va., about an hour outside Washington. During the
primaries, this would have been an informal event—Biden might
have rambled for a bit, mostly from memory, before taking
questions from the audience. This time he was all business. The
dais/teleprompter setup seemed better suited to an arena than a
small gym. Biden read his speech, shook hands, and took off. At
one point, a Secret Service guy nudged closed the rope barriers
separating the press from the rest of the room. A Biden
spokesman said he uses the teleprompter sporadically. He had
some new material about McCain supporting Bermuda tax
shelters that he wanted to get right. But you can also see why the
Obama campaign may see the value of the teleprompter: It's like
a verbal leash.
Later that day, after a speech to the National Jewish Democratic
Conference, an Obama staffer picked off reporters trying to
worm through the scrum surrounding Biden. We dutifully
returned to our pen. It would normally be fine to talk to Biden,
the staffer explained, but this was a private event, not a
campaign event. Yet Alexis Rice, communications director for
NJDC, said it was entirely up to the campaign who gets to talk to
Biden. "I'm happy to have as many reporters as possible talk to
Biden," she said.
Clamping down is a campaign's way of reasserting control. If a
candidate can go off-message in an interview with Katie Couric,
how can he be trusted to greet reporters at a rope line? Better to
run a tight ship than risk a candidate running his mouth.
But it's hard to see Biden's runaway mouth doing much damage.
Just look at the history. Biden drew glares when he suggested
that in Delaware, "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin'
Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." Later, he called
Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate
and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Careers have
ended over less. But Obama bailed him out, saying he knew
Biden meant well. Those two gaffes could easily have created
the narrative that Joe Biden is a racist. But that didn't happen.
Why? It's possible people don't care because he would only be
vice president. But that hasn't stopped the gaffe police from
monitoring everything Sarah Palin says. Another explanation is
that the media give Biden a free pass. But this ignores both
history—the media were almost singlehandedly responsible for
ending his presidential run in 1988, when they exposed his
plagiarized speeches—and current events: The media regularly
report Biden's gaffes (as well as McCain's), but they are mostly
forgotten.
The better explanation is more theoretical. There are basically
three kinds of gaffes, and Joe Biden appears to be immune to all
of them. Informational gaffes are when you get your facts wrong
(John McCain mixing up Sunni and Shiite); message gaffes are
when you get your policy wrong (Biden saying he opposed clean
coal plants in the United States); and political gaffes are when
you offend some interest group perceived to be important to
your success (Hillary Clinton referring to the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy in discussing Obama's candidacy). Each can be
damaging, depending on the candidate and his weaknesses.
Informational gaffes don't hurt Biden because, whatever his
imperfections, he's generally seen as worldly and
knowledgeable. Message gaffes don't matter because, even if it's
a headache for the campaign, they make him sound authentic. (If
he thinks the ad is "terrible," that's just his honest opinion!) And
political gaffes don't damage Biden because, well, he's so darned
congenial. Even John McCain likes him. He'll attack, but he's
rarely nasty. The only real insult he's hurled this campaign was
criticism of Rudy Giuliani's campaign as nothing more than "a
noun, a verb, and 9/11."
Adapting Biden to the general election hasn't just been about
avoiding gaffes. It's also about infusing him with Obama's
message—and style. Biden's stump speech now climaxes with
the repetition of "Imagine a world …" followed by various
Democratic fantasies. Some of his poetry about "angels' wings"
and "shining lights" sounds downright Barackian. He maintains
his unmatched ability to work a room—at the NJDC event, he
told a joke about a Jewish crew team. But it's clear at these
events that he's addressing the cameras in the back as much as
the local crowd. His remarks about McCain and Bermuda
immediately became national news.
These two adjustments—the attempts to eliminate gaffes and the
adoption of Obama's smooth style—will be tested at the vice
presidential debate Oct. 2. There, Biden's gaffe immunity will
not protect him. The McCain campaign takes umbrage almost
instantaneously, and dissing Sarah Palin could be construed as
sexist. And the vast TV audience, much of it seeing him for the
first time, may be less familiar with his gaffe history—and less
forgiving of his gaffes.
Until then, Senator, gaffe away. When Obama picked Biden,
some Democrats suggested that Biden's unpredictable tongue
would become a distraction. Others criticized him as being too
"safe." They're both right. He is a gaffe machine—but he's
harmless.
4. "I'm happy to comply, to cooperate. I have absolutely nothing
to hide."
5. "You [in the media] like to hurt people, and you like to talk
about how bad people are and all their personal failings."
politics
Troopergate vs. Troopergate: Who's
Crying Now?
Who said what about which state-trooper scandal?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 3:33 PM ET
Apparently, Americans are destined to suffer through periodic
political scandals labeled "Troopergate." In 1993, we were
plunged into the Bill Clinton/Paula Jones/Arkansas statetroopers version. Last year, we witnessed the Eliot Spitzer
iteration , and this fall, we are forced to endure the Sarah Palin
drunken brother-in-law Taser story. The truly delicious part is
that some of the same folks who once proclaimed that the
compulsive legal wrangling over Bill Clinton's "distinguishing
characteristics" was motivated by the need for truth and
transparency now dismiss as a partisan witch hunt the inquiry
into Gov. Palin's dismissal of her former Public Safety
Commissioner Walt Monegan. And vice versa, of course. Which
scandal was truly a scandal, and which is just partisan politics
run amok? Turns out the answer to that question often has more
to do with one's own partisan politics than anything else.
The Bill Clinton version mess (Troopergate I) broke in 1993
with allegations from a pair of Arkansas state troopers that they
had been involved in procuring some ladies for Gov. Clinton
back in the day. It mushroomed into impeachment. The Sarah
Palin version (Troopergate II) surfaced last July with allegations
that Palin, or someone in her administration, improperly
pressured Monegan to fire her ex-brother-in-law—state trooper
Mike Wooten—for his misbehavior while divorcing her sister.
When Monegan balked, she allegedly fired him.* Think you
know which scandal is a baseless witch hunt? Think pundits can
differentiate them any better? Herein, Slate presents Troopergate
vs. Troopergate, the quotation quiz. We have substituted XXX
for "Clinton" or "Palin" as necessary because this wouldn't be
much of a quiz otherwise. Points for identifying the scandal.
Double points if you can name the speaker.
6. "In the course of a few weeks, the [members of the opposing
party] have launched attack after attack on me, my family. …
They're desperate to win and they'll no doubt launch these
attacks against other reformers."
7. "This story seems ridiculous, and I frankly smell a rat."
8. "I think it's fair to say that XXX is not going to cooperate with
that investigation so long as it remains tainted and run by
partisan individuals that have a predetermined conclusion."
9. "Such pressure could have been perceived to exist although I
have only now become aware of it."
10. "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
11. "XXX did everything [they] could, creating all kinds of new
privileges to deny the grand jury any information or evidence
that was part of this investigation. [They] made a mockery of the
investigation, and it was all because [he/she] was trying to
protect [their] lily-white ass."
12. "I'll tell you what this Troopergate's all about. I'm going to
tell you exactly what it's all about. It's about the good ol' boys …
This is pure sexism … on the part of these old boys trying to get
rid of XXX, and [he/she] didn't put up with it, and ... didn't bend
over and let them have their way."
13. "This is not about politics. I don't know—and I don't care—
how this 'strategy' polls. This has nothing to do with vendettas or
witch-hunts or partisan advantage. … This is very simply about
the rule of law, and the survival of the American system of
justice."
14. XXX "is a 'threat' to modern feminism and that is why the
'elite media' is trying to tear them down."
1. This scandal was masterminded by "a small, intricately knit
right-wing conspiracy—and I'd like that clarified."
15. "When the … scandal broke, XXX affected the role of victim
while at the same time [he/she] was quarterbacking the coverup,
manning the battle stations, and manufacturing the spin about a
… conspiracy."
2. "The media hysterically denounced XXX. … They tried to
create a 'Troopergate.' "
16. "[He/She]'s just authentic, [he/she]'s for real, and [he/she]'s
just a total package."
3. "No one wants to get this matter behind us more than I do—
except maybe all the rest of the American people."
17. "The most dangerous thing about XXX is … [his/her]
seeming inability not to be self-reflective, not to look back on
some of the things [he/she]'s done in her own life, see mistakes,
come clean, and make changes."
Monday indicated [they] will cooperate with a separate probe
run by people [he/she] can fire."
18. "I have no doubt we will continue to see vicious, unfair and
horrible attacks on XXX."
Click here for the answers.
19. "This trooper tasered my nephew. … It's all on the record.
It's all there. His threats against the first family, the threat against
my dad. All that is in the record. And if the opposition …
chooses to forget that side of the story, they're not doing their
job."
20. "If XXX insists on having her day in court and her trial, and
she really wants to put her reputation at issue as we hear, we are
prepared to do it.''
21. "[He/She] may want to take a cue from the Miss America
contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the
wings."
22 "[W]hen you use sexism as an across-the-board shield for any
legitimate question, you only hurt women. And that's just
another splash of reality."
Correction, Sept. 24, 2008: The piece originally read "Wooten"
instead of "Monegan," implying that the trooper had been
balking at firing himself. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
sidebar
Return to article
1. Ann Coulter, admitting to the real motives behind Troopergate
I, June 1999
2. Ann Coulter, Troopergate II, September 08
3. Bill Clinton, Troopergate I, July 1998
23. An "organization that was founded in 1997 to protect
religious freedoms and First Amendment rights for individuals,
groups and churches."
4. Sarah Palin, Troopergate II, July 2008
5. Bill Clinton, Troopergate I, June 2004
24. "I don't suppose there's any public figure that's ever been
subject to any more violent personal attacks than I have. … And
that's fine. I deal with them. But I don't believe that it's the work
of God. And I think that's what the issue is."
25. "I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a
member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in
the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason
alone."
26. "It's a way we can get our story out there in our own words,
without someone making their own interpretations or
corrections."
27. "I didn't shoot him with live, you know, actual live cartridge.
… [T]he Taser was activated for less than a second, which
would be less than what you would get if you touched an electric
fence. ... It was as safe as I could possibly make it."
6. Sarah Palin fundraising e-mail, September 2008
7. Robert Bennett, Clinton's lawyer, Troopergate I, 1998
8. Sarah Palin legal adviser/spokesman Ed O'Callaghan,
Troopergate II, September 2008
9. Sarah Palin, changing her story on Trooperate II, August 2008
10. Bill Clinton, changing his story on Troopergate I, August
1998
11. Rush Limbaugh, Troopergate I, October 2005
12. Rush Limbaugh, Troopergate II, September 2008
13. Newt Gingrich on Troopergate I, May 1998
28. "It is self-evident to us all, I hope, that we cannot overlook,
dismiss or diminish the obstruction of justice by the very person
we charge with taking care that the laws are faithfully executed."
29. "Less than a week after balking at the XXX Legislature's
investigation into [their] alleged abuse of power, YYY on
14. Newt Gingrich on the media conspiracy to destroy Palin,
September 2008
15. Phyllis Schlafly on Hillary Clinton, Troopergate I, 2000
16. Phyllis Schlafly on Sarah Palin, September 2008
17. Laura Ingraham on Hillary Clinton's flaws, Troopergate I,
2000
18. Laura Ingraham on Sarah Palin attacks, September 2008
19. Sarah Palin on why the victim is to blame in Troopergate II,
September 2008
20. Clinton lawyer Robert Bennett on why the victim is to blame
in Troopergate I, June 1997
21. Maureen Dowd on Hillary Clinton, May 2008
22. Maureen Dowd on Sarah Palin's cries of sexism, September
2008
23. Liberty Legal Institute, the Texas-based legal group that has
filed suit in Alaska to halt the "McCarthyistic investigation" into
Palin, Troopergate II, September 2008
24. Bill Clinton, June 1994
25, Sarah Palin, September 2008
26. Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones promising to dish about
all things sexual and Clinton on their new Web site, June 2008
27. Mike Wooten, rationalizing a little playful tasering,
September 2008
28. Sen. John McCain statement on voting yes to impeach Bill
Clinton, February 1999
29. The Associated Press, Sept. 22, 2008
press box
McCain Bites the Press
Just because the press loves Obama doesn't mean it hates McCain.
By Jack Shafer
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 6:15 PM ET
Yesterday, the McCain campaign pilloried the New York Times
in a conference call with the press. Senior adviser Steve
Schmidt, taking offense at a Times piece that scrutinized
McCain's campaign manager, bawled:
Whatever the New York Times once was, it is
today not by any standard a journalistic
organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy
organization that every day attacks the McCain
campaign, attacks Sen. McCain, attacks Gov.
Palin and excuses Sen. Obama.
Schmidt continued:
This is an organization that is completely,
totally 150 percent in the tank for the
Democratic candidate. ... Everything that is
read in the New York Times that attacks this
campaign should be evaluated by the
American people from that perspective, that it
is an organization that has made a decision to
cast aside its journalistic integrity and tradition
to advocate for the defeat of one candidate, in
this case, John McCain, and advocate for the
election for the other candidate, Barack
Obama.
The Times devoted a short write-up to Schmidt's inflammatory
remarks in today's edition. Spraying flame retardant on the
embers, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller issued a statement,
quoted in the article, stating that the paper has covered both
candidates "fully, fairly, and aggressively."
The attack on the Times elicited liberal shrieks: Washington Post
columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. blogged that the McCain campaign
was trying to "intimidate and discredit those who try to give an
honest account of the campaign." New York University
journalism professor Jay Rosen declared on Romenekso that if
the McCain campaign regards the Times a "political action
committee working for Obama … then why does the Times have
to treat the McCain crew as a 'normal' campaign organization,
rather than a bunch of rogue operators willing to say absolutely
anything to gain power and lie to the nation once in office?" For
the Huffington Post's Sam Stein, Schmidt's comments amounted
to a declaration of war against the press.
Jeesh! Have we really gotten to the point at which a presidential
campaign operative can't throw a bag of rotten, wormy peaches
at the press without getting a load of grief in return? I don't recall
journalists—or their defenders—howling like this after the
Hillary Clinton campaign and Saturday Night Live spotted the
press corps petting Obama so heavily.
While I don't believe that the Times is pulling for Barack
Obama, and I'd never judge an entire publication by one story,
Steve Schmidt is right about the more general point he raises:
The press corps does adore Barack Obama. They like his story.
They like writing about him. They like the way he gives
speeches. They like the way he makes them feel. And they don't
mind cutting him slack whenever he acts like a regular
politician—which he is.
This, of course, is the same press corps that adored John McCain
during the 2000 race, as this comprehensive study by FAIR
shows. The press corps liked his honesty. They liked the access
he provided them. They liked his maverick stance. They liked
the way he made them feel. And they didn't mind cutting him
slack whenever he acted like a regular politician—which he was,
most of the time.
Back in 2000, McCain—like Obama today—had no
compunction about capitalizing on the infatuation. But such
puppy love between press and candidate is unsustainable. The
longer a politician hangs around Washington, the longer he casts
votes in the Senate, the more baggage-laden staffers he acquires,
the more campaign donations he accepts, and the more meat he
produces for the press to chew on. And in the heat of the
campaign, chew they will.
Signs that the press corps is untangling itself from its Obama
crush are starting to appear. Just last week, Washington Post
columnist Ruth Marcus refused to find moral equivalency
between Obama and McCain as she ripped the McCain
campaign, calling it "more dishonest, more unfair, more …
dishonorable than Barack Obama's." This week, Marcus reverses
gear—"rebalancing … the scales," she calls it—to savage the
Obama campaign for its recent attacks on McCain. Marcus
writes:
Obama has descended to similarly scurrilous
tactics on the stump and on the air. ...
Obama has been furthest out of line, however,
on Social Security, stooping to the kind of
scare tactics he once derided. ...
… Obama's cartoon version of private
accounts is not what Bush suggested, and it
certainly is not something being peddled by
McCain now. …
Where does McCain really stand on the press? Wherever
expediency demands. In a July 22 interview, CBS News anchor
Katie Couric asked McCain about one of his campaign's videos,
which alleged the "media's love affair with Sen. Obama."
McCain laughed. When she followed up by asking if he thought
he was getting "unfair coverage," McCain replied:
I don't think so. I think … it is what it is. I'm a big boy. And I'm
enjoying every minute of the campaigning. And I'm certainly not
complaining.
Please don't wake me until McCain—or Obama—start doing
their own griping.
******
I'll happily sleep through Cindy McCain's next critique of the
investigative unit that is The View. Of her joint appearance on
the show earlier this month with her husband, Cindy said, "In
spite of what you see ... in the newspapers, and on shows like
The View—I don't know if any of you saw 'The View' yesterday,
they picked our bones clean—in spite of what you see, that's not
what the American people are saying and what they are
believing." Listen to her bleat on Jake Tapper's Political Punch
blog. Send wake-up calls to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail
may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in
a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates
otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the
Washington Post Co.)
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 Schmidt in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
recycled
Packing Heat in Helsinki
Why do Finns own so many guns?
To Democrats who worry about whether their
nominee is willing to do whatever it takes to
win: You can calm down.
A smart Politico piece from yesterday by Alexander Burns and
Jim VandeHei frames McCain's relationship with the New York
Times as one of love-hate—but mostly one of love. When it has
served McCain's interests to chum around with Times reporters
and give them access, McCain has chummed around with Times
reporters and given them access. Now that political advantage
can be gained by giving the Times a mouthful of bloody
Chiclets, he's ready for that, too.
By Michelle Tsai
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 12:40 PM ET
Last week, a gunman in Finland posted on the Internet a video of
himself firing a gun and saying, "You die next." Days later, he
killed 10 people, prompting government officials to re-examine
gun-control laws in the country. In November 2007, after a
similar shooting, Michelle Tsai asked why Finns have the
world's third-highest rate of gun ownership.
An 18-year-old in Finland shot and killed eight people at his
school on Wednesday. The killer, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, then
committed suicide by turning his .22-caliber gun on himself.
Although gun violence is very rare in Finland, the country has
the highest rate of firearm ownership in Europe and the third
highest in the world, behind only the United States and Yemen.
Why do so many Finns own firearms?
Explainer thanks Kari Mokko of the Embassy of Finland,
Washington, D.C.; Andrew Nestingen at the University of
Washington; and Hanna Snellman at Lakehead University.
They're hunters. The Finns have hunted and fished for food for
thousands of years, with agriculture only catching up as a major
food source in the 20th century. Today, hunting remains a
popular weekend, or even after-work, activity. Finland is one of
the largest European countries, and there are ample grounds for
hunters. (Forests cover more than half of the country.)
Schoolhouse Rock
According to the Finnish government, the country has 1.6
million registered weapons and 650,000 people with firearm
permits. That means about 12 percent of the population owns a
weapon of some kind. More than half the permits are for
hunting, which is usually done with rifles and shotguns. The rest
of the permits are for target practice, which can involve
handguns. The student in Wednesday's shooting was a member
of the Helsinki Shooting Club, which has 1,500 members. (Other
sources cite different gun-ownership rates for Finland; one study
(PDF) estimated 41 to 69 privately owned firearms for every 100
civilians.)
Hunting is closely regulated by the Finnish government. A
would-be hunter must pass a written test on game biology,
legislation, and management before he can purchase a hunting
permit. You also must pass a rifle-shooting test and a
background check before you can obtain a firearm license. A
hunter must also be licensed for the number and type of animals
he plans to kill. (The most popular targets include moose, ducks,
geese, bears, foxes, and hares.) Teenagers who are at least 15 but
younger than 18 can apply for a firearm license as long as they
have parental permission. This week's school shooter received
his license a few weeks ago.
Finland is more gun-friendly than some other European nations.
In September, the country resisted an EU proposal to raise the
legal age for arms possession to 18, arguing that restricting
hunting for the young would result in "highly emotional and
strong reactions in Finland against the EU as a whole." Aside
from hunting, guns are also part of Finland's strong military
tradition. Young men in Finland tend to be familiar with
firearms since almost all of them join the army for compulsory
service at some point.
While Finns have a reputation for violence, firearms almost
never enter the picture. Finland does have the highest murder
rate in Western Europe, but those cases—commonly related to
alcohol or domestic abuse—often involve knives rather than
guns.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer .
A Charter-School Setback?
A successful program experiences growing pains.
By Paul Tough
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 10:05 AM ET
Science
Atomic Prose
Why can't science journalists just tell it like it is when it comes to particle
physics?
By Chris Wilson
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 7:10 AM ET
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg once
summed up his feeling about people who saw evidence of the
divine in the laws of physics like so: "I don't know why they use
words like 'designer' or 'God,' except perhaps as a form of
protective coloration."
God was mostly off the table in recent weeks—except in His
particle form—as the Large Hadron Collider revved up for a
massive series of experiments in subatomic physics. But among
science journalists, there was plenty of protective coloration of
another variety. Much of the prose from the hundreds of stories
heralding the event arced decidedly toward the purple.
"Here, inside the largest science experiment ever conducted, is
the stuff of meditation and prayer, mysteries of the sort that only
religion and Big Science can unveil with such grandeur,"
reported the Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders from Geneva. The
Washington Post's William Booth described the accelerator's
detectors as "crawling, Medusa-like, with blue, red, green cables,
like arteries and veins." These, said CNN, would provide
scientists the opportunity for a "religious experience"; the BBC
agreed, pointing out helpfully that "scientific study is often
mundane but can occasionally slip into the ecstatic." Reporting
from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where
scientists gathered to remotely celebrate the event, the New York
Times' Dennis Overbye went for broke:
Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a
cloudy sky, a reminder that the universe was
beautiful and mysterious and that another
small step into that mystery was about to be
taken.
The color provided by this sort of extravagant prose comes at a
cost. It may make for a richer read, but to decorate the science
with ornate wordplay has a way of obscuring the very ideas
those words are supposed to highlight. Such language gives
science a flavor of the mystic and inaccessible, which is exactly
the opposite of what it is: messy, full of false starts and wrong
ideas, but ultimately committed to making the universe more
coherent.
No one ever said writing about particle physics was easy—the
field of quantum mechanics shares a kind of proverbial
inscrutability with rocket science, and nonscientists are
understandably reluctant to dig in. But the best way to meet that
challenge is to address it head-on, with clear analogies and
straightforward language. The puzzles of the subatomic world—
and specifically, the quest for the Higgs boson, a particle
theorized to endow all others with mass—are interesting and
entertaining in their own right; dressing them up in florid
language only adds another layer of confusion between the
author and the reader.
Good analogies—not extravagant metaphors—are essential for
treatment of tough concepts. Fortunately, there are plenty of
good models. The legendary physicist Richard Feynman, for
example, was fond of comparing the process of exploring the
atom to smashing two pocket watches together and then trying to
figure out how they worked by examining the debris—an
analogy that neatly captures how particle physics is a distinctly
forensic exercise.
Or take the description of the Higgs boson itself. While many of
the articles about the LHC dutifully mentioned the Higgs, there
wasn't much attempt to explain the peculiar way it is supposed to
work, endowing some particles with much more mass than
others. In his book The Fabric of the Cosmos, physicist Brian
Greene takes a shot at it, working off the concept of a "Higgs
ocean"—a field of Higgs particles that covers the whole
universe:
If we liken a particle's mass to a person's fame,
then the Higgs ocean is like the paparazzi:
those who are unknown pass through the
swarming photographers with ease, but famous
politicians and movie stars have to push much
harder to their destination.
this curiosity, British physicist John Ellis compared the Higgs
ocean to a snow field; some particles are wearing boots and must
trudge heavily through the snow while others are endowed with
snowshoes or even skis that allow them to glide effortlessly over
the snow.
The particle-as-famous-person analogy has been around for a
while in various incarnations. A bastardization of it shows up in
a Times article from July 2007 by Dennis Overbye, who likens
the Higgs process to "the way a V.I.P. acquires an entourage
pushing through a cocktail party." In addition to omitting the fact
that the process works differently for different particles, Overbye
fails to understand what anyone who's seen an episode of
Entourage knows: that the VIP arrives to the party with his crew
intact—precisely the old model of mass that the Higgs
explanation replaces.
Journalists might fairly counter that they lack the space for nutsand-bolts quantum mechanics, which is better left to books.
(And the books certainly cover it. In a review of Leonard
Susskind's The Black Hole War for the Times, George Johnson
complained that before he got to the meat of the book's
argument, he "had to get through a 66-page crash course on
relativity and quantum mechanics. Every book about
contemporary physics seems to begin this way, which can be
frustrating to anyone who reads more than one.") Fair enough.
At the very least, then, the mainstream press might aim for a
more modest goal: to convey a sense of the larger themes at
work in a given set of experiments. In this case, scientists are
exploring important ideas about symmetry and simplicity in the
laws of the universe.
On the whole, the best writing about physics for a general
audience seems to come from physicists, not journalists. This
isn't due to the fact that physicists understand the subject matter
better—if anything, people who spend all day in the lab are often
the worst at explaining the big picture. Rather, they're better at
writing about physics because they don't try so hard to make you
care. They don't believe their readers must be seduced with
colorful wordplay or end-of-the-world melodramas. Journalists
writing popular treatments of subatomic physics could take a
lesson from the scientists: Tell it straight and have a little faith
that the subject matter itself—a major advance in our
understanding of the cosmos—can generate its own wonder and
excitement.
Science
Greene succinctly captures two essential concepts: First, that
mass represents the "drag" of a particle through a crowded field
of Higgs bosons. Second, some particles are more susceptible to
this drag than others; hence, the proton and neutron are more
"famous" or heavy than, say, the electron. For another shot at
Republicans Are From Mars, Democrats
Are From Venus
Why is every neuropundit such a raging liberal?
By Daniel Engber
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 5:05 PM ET
The Democrats, we hear, have begun to lose their heads. As
election polls lurched in favor of John McCain during the past
few weeks, the notion of a liberal freakout became a right-wing
talking point: Michael Gerson called the Obama campaign
"rootless, reactive and panicky"; Carly Fiorina announced that
"the Democratic Party is in a full-throated panic over Sarah
Palin"; Rush Limbaugh put the left in "a full-fledged panic
mode." Funny, then, that the neuropundits should have reached
the opposite conclusion: According to a study of political
psychology published last Thursday in Science, conservatives
tend to be the jumpier lot.
The researchers called 46 political partisans into their laboratory
at the University of Nebraska, affixed electrodes to their
fingertips and eyelids, and measured sweat output and eye blinks
in response to a series of startling stimuli. (Subjects were forced
to endure images of bloody faces and maggot-infested wounds,
as well as sudden blasts of white noise.) The results: Social
conservatives—those who supported the death penalty, the
Patriot Act, prayer in school, and the like—sweated more, and
blinked more intensely, than the liberals.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. In an appendix, the
authors declare "that our results do not suggest that one type of
physiological response to threat is more normal or 'better' than
another. … Political opponents may simply experience the world
differently and this situation may be why intensely political
people tend to talk past each other." So they're not calling out
conservatives for being sweaty, blinky, fraidy-cats; they're
merely providing a dispassionate, scientific analysis of partisan
politics. Why is our country so sharply divided into red and
blue? Could it have something to do with those confounded
"neural activity patterns," hard-wired into our brains from birth?
That's the soft sell, at least, when it comes to political brain
science. Among the neuropundits, though, the nature/nurture
question stands in for a more pressing, and more partisan,
concern. For the past five years, the left-wing researchers who
dominate the field have sought to explain—in purely rational
terms, of course—the failures of Democratic politics and the rise
of political conservatism. Sometimes the work is cast as
behavioral economics: Why do working-class Americans vote
against their economic interests? But the agenda can be quite
explicit: How come those damn Republicans keep winning
elections? And what can we do about it?
The theoretical basis for this work emerged in 2003, when
psychologist John T. Jost and three colleagues published a
review of more than 50 years worth of data on the personality
traits of right-wing ideologues. In "Political Conservatism as
Motivated Social Cognition" (PDF), they concluded that the red-
state mind-set stems from a set of "psychological needs,"
including a deep anxiety about death, lack of self-esteem, and
intolerance of ambiguity. As a result, conservatives are "less
integratively complex" than liberals, more obedient by
disposition, and inclined to cling to what they know. "For a
variety of psychological reasons, then, right-wing populism may
have a more consistent appeal than left-wing populism,"
explained one of the authors, a professor of public policy at
University of California-Berkeley.
Four years and one failed Kerry campaign later, a scientist
named David Amodio got together with Jost to flesh out the
theory with actual recordings from the human brain. They used
scalp electrodes to monitor the neural activity of liberals and
conservatives who were engaged in a simple button-pressing
task and discovered some significant differences between the
two groups. First, the authors said, the conservatives tended to
make more mistakes on the task. (Subjects had to press the space
bar whenever they saw the letter M flash on a screen but hold
back their response when a W turned up instead.) Second, the
liberal brain scans revealed "stronger conflict-related anterior
cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity
to cues for altering a habitual response pattern." That is to say,
liberals were less prone to error and better able to process
complex, conflicting information. (Click here for Slate's William
Saletan's critique of the Amodio paper.)
Last week I went to hear Jost and Amodio speak about the
conservative brain at a New York University event dedicated to
"The Neuroscience of Elections and Human Decision-Making."
This felt less like a science seminar than a special-interest meetup for Obama supporters. Amodio finished his presentation with
a series of speculations about how voter psychology would
affect the upcoming election: The McCain campaign, he said,
could win over swing voters by blurring or stretching the truth;
Obama might continue to make "qualified, informed statements"
that appeal only to his base.
When someone in the audience pointed out that the researchers
themselves appeared to be highly partisan observers, Amodio
barked, "Big deal!" He explained that scientists do tend to be
liberal, but that's on account of their predilection for the truth
and tolerance for uncertainty. (They're also more creative than
most other people, he added, which reinforces their bias to the
left.)
So it is that the most prominent and prolific neuropundits happen
to be paid Democratic consultants and professional thinkers on
the left. Take psychologist and strategist Drew Westen, who
went mass-market with the science of us vs. them in his 2007
book, The Political Brain. There he argues that the Republicans
are more skilled at activating the neural emotional circuits of
swing voters while Democrats have "an irrational emotional
commitment to rationality." (Last Wednesday, Westen told the
New York Times that the conservatives are "taking advantage of
how our brains work.")
Then in June, Berkeley professor and frequent Huff Po
contributor George Lakoff presented a nearly identical thesis—
that Democrats are too hung up on truth and rationality—in his
own analysis of voter psychology, The Political Mind. Both
Lakoff and Westen present brain science as a strategic resource
for the Obama campaign—a nerdy secret weapon. Up to now,
they say, Democrats have been so brainy that they haven't
connected with the brains of voters. But what if liberals used
their knowledge of the brain to their advantage?
The fact that all neuropundits are liberals can be explained by
the fact that most of the research originates in university labs.
Jost, Amodio, Westen, and Lakoff are all participants in an
educational system that tilts overwhelmingly to the left. We're
not just talking about the Marxists and post-structuralists in the
humanities—in 2002, Daniel Klein and Andrew Western tallied
the political affiliations of professors at Berkeley and Stanford
and found that even in the hard sciences, Democrats
outnumbered Republicans by a factor of almost 8 to 1. Among
professors of neurology and neuroscience, Klein and Western
counted 68 registered Democrats against just six Republicans.
to side with the Democrats. The data show that both political
parties have pursued overwhelmingly pro-science agendas
during the past 65 years. (If anything, research funding has
tended to increase more under Republican presidents than under
Democrats.) The Bush White House may have frustrated many
in the community with its aggressive politicization of
government science, but both candidates in this election cycle
have spoken out for scientific integrity. Both accept that global
warming is caused by human activity, and McCain appears to be
just as committed as Obama to repeal the ban on federal funding
for embryonic stem-cell research.
In the end, the liberal neuropundits may end up hurting their
cause more than they help it. The most industrious among them
have already begun to spin off private consulting firms, like
Drew Westen's Westen Strategies, that hawk spurious science
back to the party establishment. Consider high-powered
Democratic strategist Bill Knapp, who joined up with former
Clinton aide Tom Freedman to create FKF Applied Science, a
neuromarketing firm that's already managed to get its bogus
electoral brain-scans into the New York Times and the Atlantic.
These guys are selling junk. And it looks like the Democrats are
their customers.
A partisan science of partisan politics invites grave concerns
about both its methodology and interpretation. Consider last
week's paper in Science, which purported to show that
conservatives were more anxious and easily frightened than
liberals. Is that because their brains are wired differently? Or
maybe it's just nerve-racking to be summoned into a lab and
quizzed about your political beliefs by a bunch of university
professors who almost certainly disagree with you.
Neuropunditry Watch:
June 18, 2008: "Jeffrey Goldberg, Neuropundit?"
Feb. 5, 2008: "Obama Builds Lead Inside Voters' Brains!"
Dec. 7, 2007: "Return of the Neuropundits!"
Nov. 14, 2007: "Neuropundits Gone Wild!"
You might also ask why the results had to be framed in terms of
right-wing fearfulness and anxiety. The liberals could just as
well have been described as having a weird inability to register
emotion. (Indeed, a closer look at how the subjects were
classified suggests that this interpretation makes more sense.)
Likewise, the Amodio paper from 2007 demeaned conservatives
for failing to process complex or conflicting stimuli rather than
calling the liberals detail-obsessed and distractible.
slate v
Back in 2003, Jost and his colleagues made a compelling case
that conservatives tend to be more deferential to authority and
afraid of risk. But even this basic finding doesn't seem to
account for party platforms. Why are liberals so conservative
when it comes to the environment, endlessly harping on
traditional farming practices and the uncertainty surrounding
genetically modified crops, cloned meat, and the use of
pesticides? And if right-wingers are so obedient, why do they
favor smaller government and less gun control?
The irony of this liberal slant is that, from a strictly rational,
blue-brain point of view, professional scientists have no reason
Open Book: Jonathan Safran Foer
A daily video from Slate V
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 12:46 PM ET
slate v
What Was I Thinking? Junk in the Trunk
A daily video from Slate V
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET
slate v
Dear Prudence: Trysting in My Sleep
A daily video from Slate V
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 12:55 PM ET
sports nut
This Call to the Bullpen Is Eroding My
Stomach Lining
The cruel torture of watching the New York Mets' relief pitchers.
By Josh Levin
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 3:37 PM ET
On Wednesday, Sports Illustrated's Jon Heyman reported that
National League scouts aren't fond of the New York Mets relief
corps. To put it in the words of one NL talent evaluator: "Their
bullpen is bleeping brutal.'' The bullpen wasn't the biggest villain
in New York's latest loss, a spectacularly awful 9-6 defeat to the
Chicago Cubs that left New York tied for the NL wild card—
starting pitcher Oliver Perez couldn't hold a 5-1 lead, and the
offense stranded seven runners between the seventh and ninth
innings. Nevertheless, closer-by-process-of-elimination Luis
Ayala threw gasoline on the Mets' funeral pyre by giving up
three runs in the 10th. At least that wasn't as bad as Sunday, when
three relievers gave up four runs in the eighth to cost the Mets a
win against Atlanta. Or the Sunday before that, when the pen
gave up five runs in the ninth to blow a two-run lead. Or the day
before that, when they squandered a potential Johan Santana
shutout. All in all, Ayala and his comrades-in-noodle-arms have
blown 29 save opportunities in 2008, the most of any playoff
contender. Now that's bleeping brutal.
Rooting for an otherwise-decent baseball team with a
horrendous bullpen is like cheering on a soccer team that uses an
armless goalie to defend against penalty kicks. Sure, you might
get a few thrills along the way, but eventually you come to
realize that the game was lost before it began. Or perhaps a
better analogy is a basketball team that can't make free throws.
In both cases, you're carried through the first two-thirds of the
game by the excitement of building up a lead and spend the last
one-third chewing the fingernail off your foam finger. Phase 1:
We're going to win. Go team! Phase 2: Please. Please. Please.
Not again. Why? Why? Phase 3: Come on, you're supposed to be
a professional athlete! This is unbelievable. Phase 4: Deep,
choking sobs.
But the best comparison I can think of comes in football. For
four quarters, running backs and defensive linemen break one
another's bones to give their teams a chance to win. With a few
seconds to go, a specialist shuffles onto the field and pushes the
ball wide right—three hours of hard work undone by a guy who
looks like the Great Gazoo.
The big difference between a lousy kicker and a lousy bullpen:
An NFL team in need can always ring up Morten Andersen.
Fixing a subpar collection of relievers is trickier. With closer
Billy Wagner out (and eventually lost for the season) with an
elbow injury, the Mets were left with the baseball equivalent of
chewed-up bubble gum: a sorry collection of meatballers,
castoffs, and should-be minor leaguers. None of the team's quick
fixes—trading for Ayala, calling up various overmatched
fellows from AAA—has made things any better. As a Mets fan,
it's tempting to blame someone—say, General Manager Omar
Minaya—for this debacle. But the reality is that the chewed-up
bubblegum strategy often works and that it would've been
impossible to predict in spring training that every single Mets
reliever would either underperform, get hurt, or both. When a
bullpen can't do anything right, the best strategy is also the most
frustrating one: wait till next year.
For a case study in the unpredictability of major league bullpens,
consider the Tampa Bay Rays. To go along with the best record
in the American League, the Miracle Rays have the circuit's
second-best bullpen ERA at 3.46. In 2007, the Rays finished
with 66 wins and a bullpen ERA of 6.16, the worst in the majors
since at least the 1950s. This season's dramatic turnaround isn't
the result of a philosophical change on the part of Tampa's front
office. In both seasons, the Rays threw together a collection of
low-paid, hard-throwing retreads and never-weres. The 2007
group—led by Al Reyes, Brian Stokes, Shawn Camp, Gary
Glover, Grant Balfour, and Dan Wheeler (a midseason
acquisition)—was historically awful. The 2008 group—led by
Troy Percival, Trever Miller, Jason Hammel, J.P. Howell (a
converted starter who had a 7.59 ERA in 2007), Glover, Balfour,
and Wheeler—has been stupendous. (Baseball Prospectus' Nate
Silver argues that the Rays' bullpen has been helped by the
team's improved defense, but the Tampa fielders would have to
be toting 90-foot-wide gloves to account for a nearly three-run
improvement in ERA.)
The Cleveland Indians are the Rays' evil twin. After losing a
tight AL Championship Series to the Red Sox last season, the
Indians were a trendy World Series pick this year. Instead, the
Indians started so poorly that, unlike the Mets, they never had
the chance to disappoint their fans with a late-season collapse.
One cause of the Cleveland cave-in: a bullpen that's gone from
sixth in the majors in ERA in 2007 to 29 th in 2008. (The Mets
rank 22nd.) The Indians, perhaps the best-run team in baseball
since Mark Shapiro took over as general manager in 2001,
seemed to do everything right. The team dumped its perpetually
disappointing closer Joe Borowski this year and gave more
responsibility to a trio of up-and-comers (Jensen Lewis, Rafael
Betancourt, and Rafael Perez) who'd blitzed through the
American League in 2007. All three have performed worse this
season than last, and the rest of the Indians' pen has been even
worse.
The Mets didn't come into the 2008 season nearly as prepared as
the Indians. As Chris Park wrote in Slate last year, "Clubs can
reduce their risk of crushing bullpen failures by stockpiling
young or undervalued arms and relying on whoever happens to
be hot that year." New York had no relievers as talented as any
member of the Cleveland trio, having used minor league
fireballers like Heath Bell and Matt Lindstrom as trade bait in
recent years. The team's major league roster was also cluttered
with not-even-mediocrities like Scott Schoeneweis and Matt
Wise. Even so, considering the year-to-year unpredictability of
middle relievers, the Mets could be commended for refusing to
patch their biggest hole with lots of money. Aaron Heilman and
Joe Smith and Pedro Feliciano and Duaner Sanchez and even
Jorge Sosa had all experienced bouts of goodness in recent
years. Who's to say they couldn't do it again? After all, a similar
patchwork strategy worked wonders for the Mets in 2006. That
year, the team finished second in MLB in bullpen ERA thanks to
a bunch of players with short résumés—Heilman and Feliciano
and Sanchez, to name a few.
Of course, this type of dispassionate reasoning isn't particularly
comforting when you're watching a succession of Schoeneweises
fritter away the season. At this point, only something as
ludicrous as installing Santana as the closer could change the
Mets' late-inning fortunes. (Sorry, John Maine, I have a feeling
you're just going to make things worse.) For Mets fans, one
small point of comfort is that the one thing worse than suffering
through a bad bullpen is going overboard to fix it. The 1997
Seattle Mariners were an offensive juggernaut (Alex Rodriguez,
Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner) with a bullpen that
makes the 2008 Mets look like a bunch of Mariano Riveras
(closer Norm Charlton's ERA: 7.27). At the trade deadline,
Seattle traded Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe to the Red Sox for
Heathcliff Slocumb. The Mariners made the playoffs and lost the
division series in four games; Varitek and Lowe became key
members of Boston first's World Series winner in 86 years. The
Curse of the Bambino? That's nothing compared with the Curse
of the Bleeping Brutal Bullpen.
swingers
The Colorado Purple
The state is finally taking a shine to Democrats. But is it blue enough to
accept Obama?
By Christopher Beam
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 4:22 PM ET
DENVER—The good news for Barack Obama is that Colorado
is more Democratic today than it was four years ago, when John
Kerry lost the state by almost five percentage points. The bad
news is that a Colorado Democrat is not necessarily an Obama
Democrat.
In 2004, Democrats recaptured majorities in both chambers of
the Colorado Legislature and replaced retiring Republican U.S.
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell with Ken Salazar, a pro-gun
moderate. Two years later, they elected pro-life Democrat Bill
Ritter as governor. Both men are part of a long tradition of
conservative Colorado Democrats, and their statewide
organizations will undoubtedly help Obama. Even more
encouraging is the recent success of a semi-obscure five-term
congressman from Boulder who is running for Colorado's open
Senate seat. If Mark Udall can win in Colorado, the thinking
goes, so can Barack Obama.
The problem is that Udall is not a typical Colorado Democrat.
His district includes Boulder, the state's liberal enclave, and he
has the voting record to match. He supports universal health
care, civil unions, and abortion rights, and he opposes drilling on
Colorado's Roan Plateau and the military's "don't ask, don't tell"
policy. Udall (the son of former Arizona congressman Mo
Udall) also voted against the authorization of military force in
Iraq in 2002.
Obama's positions line up well with Udall's. Because this is
Colorado, however, Obama has to be careful not to identify his
campaign too much with Udall's. To win the state, Obama needs
the Salazar and Ritter voters in the center. Westerners like to
describe themselves as "independent," but Colorado has the
numbers to back it up. A quarter of the population—and a third
of registered voters—has no party designation. These voters are
most heavily concentrated outside Denver in Jefferson and
Arapahoe counties.
The state has its havens of orthodoxy, like Colorado Springs,
home to Focus on the Family, and the aforementioned Boulder.
But most voters sit somewhere in between. Ask politicos in the
state to describe an average unaffiliated voter, and you hear
everything from "Wal-Mart moms" to small-business
immigrants to anti-war pro-lifers to fiscally conservative
environmentalists. The one thing everyone seems to agree on:
"Unaffiliateds," supposedly, are put off by negative attacks.
If so, the candidates—and the 527s that support them—didn't get
the memo. Colorado attack ads make "Celebrity" look polite.
One now-famous spot depicts two veterans mocking Udall for
supporting a "Department of Peace." "Boulder liberal," they
keep repeating. "Radical Islam wants Americans dead," the
narrator tells us. "What part of dead does Mark Udall not
understand?" Another ad portrays the Department of Peace as a
hot-boxed VW bus. An ad against Udall's opponent, Bob
Schaffer, a former member of the U.S. House, shows a club of
10-gallon-hat-wearing oil barons sitting around a poker table,
toasting to "Big Oil Bob."
As for whether the ads work, the results are still unclear. Polls
show Udall leading Schaffer by about five points. He's winning
unaffiliated voters by a 2-to-1 margin. And of course, the Udall
campaign claims the anti-Udall ads are doing more good than
harm.
So why isn't there more coordination between Udall and Obama?
At his appearances in Colorado last week, Obama was
introduced by Ritter and Salazar. Udall spokeswoman Tara
Trujillo unconvincingly cites logistics: "We don't know if
Obama's going to be in town until a couple days beforehand."
More likely, the reasons are deeper. In Colorado, fiscal
conservatism is not exclusively Republican. Guns and religion
are important issues, not simply things for people to cling to.
Bipartisanship is practically a fetish. "If there's a gang, [Salazar]
joins it," says independent pollster Floyd Ciruli. Thus Udall is
more of a barometer for Obama's success—if he's doing well,
then Obama should do well—than a model for it.
Politics aside, Obama is also trying not to repeat John Kerry's
tactical mistakes of four years ago. Unlike Kerry, who at this
point in 2004 was yanking ads from the state, Obama's campaign
has opened 26 offices. "We've never had as much staff in the
field as we have right now," says state Democratic Party Chair
Pat Waak. Last week, Obama visited Grand Junction and
Pueblo—not exactly the belly of the beast, but somewhere
toward the back of its throat.
None of which worries Dick Wadhams. The chairman of the
Colorado Republican Party has two jobs this election: First, to
make sure his state does not swing Democratic for the first time
since 1992. And second, to get Schaffer elected to the Senate
over Udall. (They are running for the seat left open by
Republican Wayne Allard, who is retiring.) Wadhams' strategy
is almost a mirror opposite of the Obama campaign's: lump
Obama and Udall together at every opportunity. They're both
typical tax-and-spend liberal weenies ("mile-high, inch-deep").
The name Udall doesn't escape Wadhams' lips without the prefix
Boulder liberal. After a while, they start to sound like Udall's
first and middle names.
Of course, Wadhams can get exercised about Obama, too. The
candidate's acceptance speech, he says, was a "self-worship
rally" that displayed the "elitism" of the Democratic Party.
Republicans also dismiss the Democrats' field organization,
which Wadhams called the "One Field Office for Every Voter
Plan." "Theirs is more of a shotgun approach," says state GOP
spokesman Tom Kise. "Ours is more of a laser, very strategic."
These attempts to peg Udall and Obama as fey liberals may be
the Republicans' only hope. In everyone's favorite phrasing, the
"fundamentals are strong" for Democrats. The state has seen an
influx of new voters in the counties surrounding Denver.
Meanwhile, Democrats are catching up in the registration game.
During most of the '90s, there were about 150,000 more
registered Republicans than Democrats. Their advantage has
shrunk to about 60,000. Turnout has been rising. Larimer
County, north of Denver, saw 93 percent Democratic turnout in
2006. For a midterm election, that's unheard of.
Even in deeply conservative El Paso County, which includes
Colorado Springs, Democrats are optimistic. They can't win the
county, says Democratic state Sen. John Morse. But "if we can
get 40 percent," he says, "then we win."
It's a modest goal—but then, El Paso County has voted for the
GOP presidential candidate for decades, and in 2004 Kerry won
only 32 percent of the vote. And, truth be told, such modesty is
in keeping with the Colorado Democrats' general demeanor.
Obama may want to change the world, but Colorado Democrats
will be happy with changing the minds of 8 percent of voters in
El Paso County.
technology
The Cell Phone Wars
Apple's iPhone is closed. Google's G1 is open. Which is better?
By Farhad Manjoo
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 5:41 PM ET
In August, a programmer named Alex Sokirynsky wrote a clever
app to let iPhone users stream or download podcasts straight
from their phones. (Ordinarily, the iPhone can play only the
podcasts you've downloaded through your computer.)
Sokirynsky submitted the program, called Podcaster, for
inclusion in Apple's iPhone App Store—the only way for thirdparty developers to distribute their programs to iPhone users.
Weeks passed; Sokirynsky heard nothing from Apple. Then, on
Sept. 11, the company sent him a note. Apple had rejected
Podcaster because "it duplicates the functionality of the podcast
section of iTunes," an Apple rep told Sokirynsky.
Apple's explanation didn't make any sense. The iPhone App
Store carries many programs—for instance, calculators and
instant-messenger apps—that mimic desktop software. And
anyway, why is "duplicating functionality" so bad—isn't that the
soul of competition? Sokirynsky's program didn't seem to violate
any written guidelines that Apple had put out for iPhone apps.
So why was Apple banning Podcaster?
Nobody knows. In the two months since the App Store's launch,
Apple has rejected several programs for seemingly arbitrary
reasons that it won't disclose. Developers have grumbled about
this capriciousness, but until now they've had no real
alternative—iPhone and iPod Touch owners have already
downloaded 100 million apps through the App Store, making
Apple the Wal-Mart of mobile software.
And then along came Sergey Brin and Larry Page. On Tuesday,
the Google founders unveiled the G1, the first phone based on
Google's new mobile operating system, Android. The phone,
which will go on sale in late October, is manufactured by the
Taiwanese company HTC and is being offered exclusively
through T-Mobile, but Google's software will soon make its way
to other phones and other carriers across the globe. Google says
that Android embodies principles of "radical openness." Unlike
Apple, the company will let developers create any mobile apps
they please. Google has also persuaded carriers to allow users to
run any apps they like—including voice-over-IP software like
Skype, which carriers have traditionally resisted because it lets
you make calls without running up cellular minutes.
Watching Google and Apple carve out space in the mobile
business, one can hardly avoid thinking that history is repeating
itself. In the 1970s and '80s, Apple created the first great
personal computers. But because Apple closed its platform, it
was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the
benefits of Apple's innovations. The Mac's operating system ran
only on Mac computers; Windows ran on lots of lots of different
companies' hardware. This made non-Apple computers both
cheaper than Apple's machines—competition between hardware
manufacturers pushed down prices—and more useful, as thirdparty developers flocked to write must-have programs for
Windows. Apple seems to be following a similar restrictive
strategy with the iPhone. Already, some developers have
threatened to move to Android; Sokirynsky says he's building an
Android version of Podcaster. Hasn't Steve Jobs learned
anything in the last 30 years?
Well, maybe he has—and maybe he's betting that these days,
"openness" is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much
more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows
computer crashes more often than your Mac computer
because—among many other reasons—Windows has to
accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell's machines use
different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than
Gateway's, and they're both different from Lenovo's. The Mac
OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple's
rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the
reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with
viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform
attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for
illegitimate ones.
Google's Android OS is "open" in two distinct ways. First,
Google has released the software under an open-source license,
allowing hardware manufacturers to customize Android for
different phones. Second, Android is open to third-party apps;
Google and the carriers will make sure that apps do not violate
the law or harm people's phones, but other than that, they
promise to impose few restrictions. While this is just what
developers like Alex Sokirynsky want to hear, it's not obvious
that this level of openness will be good for users. Will a game
that was developed for a phone with a relatively fast processor
crash on a phone with a slower processor? What if you buy an
app that requires a full keyboard, but you're running a phone
without one—how will Android respond? Engadget pointed out
that even before its public launch, Android's Marketplace is full
of programs that don't adhere to a single design paradigm,
making for a "sea of mediocrity." Is that the danger of running a
store without a rigorous approval process?
Let's remember, too, that if keeping a platform closed was Steve
Jobs' greatest blunder, it was also a part of his greatest success.
The iPod is a closed platform: The device runs Apple's software,
it connects to iTunes on your computer, and its music store sells
songs that will work only on Apple's devices. In 2004, Microsoft
tried to take on the iPod with a more open music strategy called
PlaysForSure. (OK, relatively more open; PlaysForSure, like
songs sold on iTunes, included a copy-protection scheme.)
Microsoft set out to certify and license music players made by
lots of different manufacturers, an attempt to fight Apple's music
business the same way it had taken on Apple's computer
business. But this time Microsoft failed—the iPod-iTunes link
simply worked better than the tangle of PlaysForSure devices.
Eventually Microsoft went Apple's way—it ditched
PlaysForSure in favor of the Zune, for which it designs both the
hardware and software.
Why did a closed platform hurt the Mac but not the iPod? In his
book Inside Steve's Brain, Wired.com editor Leander Kahney
argues that in the early PC market, flexibility was of paramount
importance. Businesses were the early adopters of the computer
world, and they wanted systems that were cheap and could run
all kinds of programs. But those factors aren't as important in the
consumer-electronics market; people like some measure of
openness in their devices, but they also don't mind ceding
control in return for security and convenience. The video-game
industry proves this. No console is open—Microsoft and Sony
approve every game that you can buy on your XBox or PS3. But
most gamers don't mind that, because in return they're assured
that games reach a certain minimum standard—you don't have to
worry that Grand Theft Auto will trash your game system.
None of this is to say there's anything defensible about Apple's
rejections of iPhone apps. It got rid of I Am Rich, a $1,000
program that did nothing, and Pull My Finger, a fart-joke app,
for "limited utility"—which would be understandable if so many
iPhone Apps weren't pretty limited. (How did Apple decide that
a program that turns your phone into a flashlight is more useful
than a program that turns your phone into a whoopee cushion?)
Apple also rejected a comic book app called Murderdrome
because its contents were too violent—even though it offers
extremely violent movies in the iTunes Store. And it blocked an
e-mail client because it competed with the iPhone's built-in email app, a transparently anti-competitive move.
But there's no sign, yet, that any of these moves poses any harm
to the iPhone's long-term prospects as an attractive platform for
developers. Reports suggest that successful iPhone developers
have made hundreds of thousands of dollars—which seems
reason enough for them to labor under Apple's unpredictable
policies. Apple seems to be pursuing a strategy of just-openenough—permissive enough to keep programmers writing code
and to keep customers buying software but still locked-down
enough to let Apple control the platform's larger direction.
travel site, his Facebook piece draws from this ad company, and
his hotel guides pull from the hotels' Web sites.
So far, Apple's restrictions on apps haven't turned off iPhone
users, either. That may change if someone develops a killer app
for Android that can't be replicated on the iPhone—Skype, for
example, or a program to "tether" your phone to your laptop,
letting you get online through your cell plan. But if users
threaten to quit the iPhone because it lacks certain apps, you can
bet that Jobs will find a way to respond. Over the years, he's
shown a willingness to embrace openness when it has suited
Apple's bottom line—the iPod, after all, works on Windows
computers. Until that day comes, the iPhone will remain semiopen for business.
Knol is a wasteland of such articles: text copied from elsewhere,
outdated entries abandoned by their creators, self-promotion,
spam, and a great many old college papers that people have dug
up from their files. Part of Knol's problem is its novelty. Google
opened the system for public contribution just a couple months
ago, so it's unreasonable to expect too much of it at the moment;
Wikipedia took years to attract the sort of contributors and
editors who've made it the amazing resource it is now.
technology
Chuck Knol
Why Google's online encyclopedia will never be as good as Wikipedia.
By Farhad Manjoo
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 5:57 PM ET
There are two articles about Sarah Palin on Google Knol, the
search company's abysmal new Wikipedia-like reference guide.
One of them is a mess: Just a few hundred words long, the
article is fraught with factual and grammatical errors. The other
Palin entry is much more readable and informative, offering a
thorough, balanced look at Palin's years in city and state
government and her positions on national political issues. Unlike
Wikipedia, Knol displays its authors' names and credentials to
help you decide whether to trust a given piece. When I click on
the name of the second Palin entry's author, Sam Goldfarb, I see
that he's also written Knol articles about advertising on
Facebook, the Chinese territory of Macau, and several hotels in
Israel. How does Goldfarb know so much about so many things?
You might call him a keen student of the Web—a bit of
Googling confirms that each of his articles was lifted from other
online sources.
Goldfarb's great Palin entry is a copy of the Wikipedia article on
the Alaska governor as it appeared on Aug. 29, the day John
McCain picked Palin as his running mate. That's why the Knol
piece still describes Palin as having "successfully killed the
Bridge to Nowhere"; the Wikipedia entry on Palin has since
been updated thousands of times, and it now tells a more
nuanced story about her flip-flop on the bridge. (Wikipedia's
articles are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
License, which allows people to copy an entry's text as long as
they also reproduce the license; Goldfarb's Palin article and
many others on Knol that copy from Wikipedia don't follow
those rules.) Goldfarb's Macau article is lifted from this Macau
But Google has grand ambitions for Knol. In a December blog
post announcing the project, the company's engineering chief,
Udi Manber, wrote that Google wants Knol articles to stand as
"the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first
time will want to read." Of course, the first thing you find for
many topics you search for now—including Sarah Palin—is a
Wikipedia article. Unless Google radically redesigns Knol, it
looks unlikely to supplant Wikipedia. The project suffers two
critical flaws that promote poorly written, poorly sourced, and
plagiarized articles. First, Knol diminishes community
involvement, giving authors complete control over their
postings. Second, it rewards authors with advertising lucre,
creating a huge incentive for people to post as much content as
possible. That probably helps explain why so much of Knol's
content is repurposed from elsewhere.
These aren't haphazard mistakes. Google put these two measures
in place by design to differentiate Knol from the world's preeminent online encyclopedia. Wikipedia operates on a principle
known as NPOV—contributors and editors aim for a flat,
"unbiased" tone and a "neutral point of view." Wikipedia is
functionally anonymous. You judge the reliability of any
Wikipedia piece not on the strength of the writing or the
credentials of its authors but, instead, by the documents it cites
to support its statements. (Never trust a Wikipedia article riddled
with "citation needed" warnings.)
Google says neutrality and anonymity are overrated. Instead,
Knol prizes personality and expertise. "We believe that knowing
who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of
Web content," Manber wrote last year. While Google
encourages authors to add citations in their articles, you're
supposed to judge a Knol piece not by its references but by the
credentials of its author and the force with which he makes his
case. That's why Knol allows different people to post different
articles on Sarah Palin. Competition between authors, Manber
argued, produces better content.
Google's argument fits in with the long history of writing and
publishing. After all, we read books and magazines not for their
neutrality but for an author's clear point of view. Similarly, if
you don't know a thing about Roger Federer, you'll learn much
more from David Foster Wallace's appreciation of the star
athlete than from the Wikipedia entry that states in bland, NPOV
language that "tennis critics, legendary players, and current
players consider him the greatest tennis player ever." So what's
wrong with encouraging a bounty of such articles online—a
reference guide that's both informative and stylishly written?
What's wrong is that perspective and style don't scale. Writing is
hard even for the world's greatest wordsmiths; it requires time,
thought, and care. Good writing also usually requires good
editing. Because Wikipedia's NPOV guidelines set clear rules for
what's allowed on the site, Wikipedia is easy to edit—anyone
can look up the tenets of NPOV and then set about cleaning up
contributions that stray from the preferred style.
By default, Knol articles can be edited by readers, but each edit
must be accepted by the original author before the revision takes
hold. Along with the obvious problem of giving authors control
of when they're edited, Knol doesn't give readers any guidelines
for how to edit. One Knol article on Tori Amos describes her
2007 album American Doll Posse as marking a return to "daring
and somewhat angry" songs and adds that her voice on the
record sounded better than it has "since 2001." Those lines are
vague and mushy: What about the album is angry? Why does her
voice sound so much better than before? Under Wikipedia's
NPOV rules, both descriptions would have to go, and any reader
could delete them with a couple of keystrokes. But Knol allows
such personal opinions, so you'd have to persuade the writer to
excise them on other grounds—which, of course, takes a lot of
work. Instead of going through the trouble, I clicked away.
As I perused Knol over the past couple of weeks, I tried to
contact the authors of the few articles that I found interesting.
This proved difficult; Knol doesn't require writers to post their
contact information. Even though readers are asked to accept
these people as experts on a topic, there's no easy way to ask
them questions about their expertise. Still, I did manage to
contact a few Knol posters, and I was surprised by what I found:
Most people who contributed to Knol did so for money.
Some authors wanted to test the power of Ad Sense, the text ads
that Google lets writers place alongside their articles—Google
gives authors a share of the revenue it generates from those ads.
(People told me they hadn't earned more than a couple of dollars
from these.)
Other authors were interested in promoting their Web
businesses. Natasha Derrick, who runs a Web site called Hawaii
Travel Guide with her husband, had repurposed several of her
old pieces on Hawaii to post on Knol. (The Knol pieces include
links to her Hawaii Travel Guide.) Derrick told me she hasn't
seen any increase in traffic to her site yet. But she and her
husband see Knol as a way to "get in on the ground floor" of
something great. Knol could be the next Wikipedia, and
Derrick's piece on the Hana Highway might make its way up the
search rankings, delivering throngs of people to her site.
Derrick's plan dovetails nicely with Google's: If Knol is the next
Wikipedia, both the writer and the company make a killing. The
problem is that we don't need the next Wikipedia. Today's
version works amazingly well.
television
Knight Rider 2.0
A show so bad it makes one long for David Hasselhoff.
By Troy Patterson
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 5:22 PM ET
Though engineered for the delectation of boys who are too old
for Hot Wheels and too young for learner's permits, Knight
Rider (NBC, Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET) arrives tricked out with
just enough eccentricity to avoid utterly craven stupidity. That
level of near-competence is perhaps all we can expect from
NBC, given the network's recent record of reviving vintage TV.
Last year, someone over there took Bionic Woman—which
began its brief life as the best new show of the season: tense,
menacing, existential, and foxy—and sucked all the bio- out of it
within three episodes. "They did something really dumb with
that show," Bill Carter observed to Charlie Rose that fall. "They
decided that the pilot was too dark, and they made it as
pedestrian as they could." There is no danger of NBC's repeating
that mistake: Knight Rider, a sequel to the 1980s hit about the
crime-fighting, sentient car, first returned a few months back as
a TV movie—a "backdoor pilot" in industry jargon. Nothing else
they come up with could possibly be more pedestrian than that
backdoor pilot.
So if you're looking to see the sci-fi Cheese Whiz of your youth
transformed into something compelling, then you're probably
already watching Battlestar Galactica. The new Knight Rider,
meanwhile, has less gravity than the old Knight Rider. One
actually longs for the presence of David Hasselhoff, who played
hero Michael Knight in the original. The distinctively animal
weirdness of the hirsute Hoff has been replaced by the squarejawed humanoid blandness of someone or other.
The role of the car's voice (once drolly phonated by William
Daniels, with some of Trevor Howard's clipped superiority and
just a touch of C-3PO's fussiness) has fallen to Val Kilmer, who
makes his intelligence sound eerily artificial: Just because the
car, KITT, is more congenial than HAL 9000 doesn't make him
any less chilling, and Kilmer's too much a Method actor to
consider playing it for camp. (His voice keeps a straight face,
almost a saving grace.) The show replaces the original's Pontiac
Trans Am with an indestructible Mustang also capable of
transforming into other vehicles found on the lot of your local
Ford dealer.
Further, the new Knight Rider discards the vigilante Western
mood of the Reagan-era original in favor of fashionably
careering through the world of surveillance as presented by
Alias, 24, and the Bourne films. (Doug Liman, who directed The
Bourne Identity and also, damningly, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is an
executive producer, so let's credit him with bringing some
kiddie-ride zing to the proceeding.) There's some counterfeit
James Bond in there, too: KITT is like a career-topping gadget
by Q, and he tends to speak to the new Michael Knight in tones
as reproving as M's. Near the opening of the first regular
episode, while the evening-suited hero is racing around inside a
party at "Foreign Consulate, U.S.A.," the car chides him through
his earpiece: "You would probably move faster if you ate a
healthy diet, decreased your alcohol intake, and reduced the
extracurricular activity with your lady friends." Just don't tell the
post-Hot Wheels crowd that the Ian Fleming creation that Knight
Rider most closely resembles—in its raison d'être prop, yes, but
also its general level of sophistication—is Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang.
Beyond his special friendship with his motorized steed, Michael
Knight has human colleagues, who sit in front of fancy computer
screens wearing tank tops and bantering and plotting whoknows-what. (After Alias, spy shows no longer feel obliged to
make sense, and obscurity is embraced as a virtue.) He has a
love interest, Sarah, the daughter of KITT's inventor. Sarah has
long hair, gray eyes, and classy taste in underwear, as we
discover in a scene where KITT absorbs a hit from a heatseeking missile and then motors around for a very long time
engulfed in the flames of "an advanced form of napalm." But
Knight also has an old flame he doesn't even remember—
something about black ops, French-kissing in Beirut, multiplepersonality disorder, maybe, as if it matters. The main thing is
that the mystery woman vrooms onto the scene exactly like a
Russ Meyers supervixen; then cuts off another character's thumb
in order to obtain a sample of his DNA; and then carries the
thumb, in a transparent jar, into an exceedingly phony stand-in
for a Washington, D.C., Metro station. Would a swab of the
cheek have been too simple for Knight Rider's tastes? But that's
the wrong question: Taste isn't an issue here.
the big idea
Obama's Message Deficit
Why he needs an economic slogan.
By Jacob Weisberg
Saturday, September 20, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET
Barack Obama has a range of sensible economic policies. He has
a team of prudent advisers with a centrist, pro-trade cast. He may
even have some grasp of why the American financial system
collapsed last week.
What Obama doesn't have, so far, is an economic message. He's
missing a story about what's gone wrong with the American
economy and how to fix it. He hasn't managed to present his
various proposals on taxes, health care, energy, housing
foreclosures, and the rest in a way that resonates with voters. He
hasn't emphasized a few signature policies to let us know what
his top priorities are. He hasn't got a decent slogan. If you go to
the economy section on Obama's Web site, the banner that greets
you proclaims, "Responsible Tax Cuts for Ordinary Americans."
It's accompanied by an image of two piggy banks, a small one
labeled "Taxes" and a big one labeled "Savings." The fat piggie
is overflowing with pennies. What, exactly, is the concept here?
That we should save less to feed the tax piglet?
The ability to organize economic issues around a simple, lucid
theme was a talent of our two most successful recent presidents.
Ronald Reagan offered an overarching narrative about how
government had come to play too large a role in the economy.
His most famous slogans—"Get the government off our backs,"
"Morning again in America," "Are you better off than you were
four years ago?"—all got at his notion of unshackling enterprise
from its bureaucratic fetters to restore growth. Bill Clinton had a
different tale about how ordinary Americans—people who work
hard and play by the rules—were falling behind. His
catchphrases—"Putting people first," "It's the economy, stupid,"
"Building a bridge to the 21st century"—similarly supported the
policy changes he thought would help the struggling middle
class.
For examples of candidates who weren't good at this, you need
look no further than Al Gore and John Kerry. Burdened by the
need to separate himself from Clinton toward the end of the '90s
boom, Gore delivered a message that Michael Kinsley
characterized as, "You've never had it so good, and I'm mad as
hell about it." Kerry took an equally incongruous populist tack in
2004, fulminating unconvincingly about how he'd prevent
corporations from shipping jobs overseas.
Barack Obama is a more persuasive messenger, but his
economic message has yet to transcend the Gore-Kerry muddle.
Obama lacks any compelling story line about why
unemployment, inflation, and inequality are rising, why the
middle class is stagnating, or why the financial system has
stopped working. His thematic framing is both too broad and not
proprietary enough. His message of change and postpartisanship blurs together dissatisfaction with the economy, the
war in Iraq, President Bush, special-interest politics, and the
assorted depredations of "Washington." John McCain can wear
these clothes nearly as easily as Obama can. And Obama's lack
of a resonant economic message has left too much space in the
political discourse for freak-show debates about lipstick and
moose hunting.
Why has Obama not done a better job conveying his approach to
reordering the economy? Part of the difficulty lies with the skills
of the people who do and don't work for him. Thus far, the
Obamans have played an astonishingly good ground game. But I
think it's fair to say that the campaign's Chicago-based high
command is stronger on campaign mechanics than message. In
Chicago, you don't win a mayoral race with grand ideas. You
focus on quality-of-life issues and get voters to the polling place
on Election Day. Absent from Obama's inner circle is the
Democrat A-team most skilled at deploying a thematic
message—people like Paul Begala, James Carville, Gene
Sperling, and Bruce Reed. All of them worked for the last
Democratic president, and as a result were on Hillary Clinton's
side in the primaries. Some of them are helping Obama, but none
is close to him.
The larger challenge is the candidate's cool, cerebral style.
Reasoning is a fine quality in a decision-maker and bodes well
for an Obama presidency, if he gets to have one. But when
campaigning, it's helpful to be a passionate storyteller as well.
Alas, Obama doesn't seem to think in the anecdotal, visceral
terms that nonwonks relate to. His relationship to economic
ideas is largely analytic. As David Leonhardt has argued,
Obama's understanding reflects a University of Chicago
synthesis of neoclassical free-market thinking with behavioral
economics. Obama's top economic advisers, Jason Furman and
Austan Goolsbee, reflect his scholarly sophistication. What they
don't do is check his tendency to circle around a point instead of
making it crisply and then hammering it home. As we say in
journalism, Obama likes to bury his lede.
What would such a stronger Democratic economic message look
like? There may be a preview of it in Obama's new two-minute
ad, which puts the larger problem in Clinton-esque terms: "The
truth is that while you've been living up to your responsibilities,
Washington has not." But Obama still has a long way to go in
explaining where the American faith in broadly shared
prosperity got lost, and how his policies could bring it back. His
proposals to reallocate the tax burden, invest in infrastructure,
decouple health insurance from employment, and transition to
renewable resources are components of a coherent effort to
renew the American dream. Now it's time for him to frame them
that way.
A version of this article also appears in this week's issue of
Newsweek.
The Big Sort
Why No One Trusts the Government To
Fix Anything Anymore
Things haven't been the same since LBJ's Great Society.
By Bill Bishop
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 3:47 PM ET
the green lantern
Dirty Dogs and Carbon Cats
The greenest ways to care for your pet.
By Jacob Leibenluft
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 6:45 AM ET
This one is a little gross, but I have lots of pets at home, and
most of my weekly waste is composed of dog and cat poop.
What's the best way to dispose of all that so that I don't end
up hurting the environment?
The Lantern has never been trusted to care for any pet larger
than a hamster—rest in peace, Fonzie!—so he'll admit that this
question falls a little outside his comfort zone. But your question
raises an important point: To own a dog or cat can significantly
increase the ecological footprint of your household. The Lantern
hopes to cover other aspects of domestic animal husbandry in
the future, but today let's focus one of the most important ways
you can manage your pet's "pawprint": responsible waste
disposal.
Whether you have a dog or a cat, you'll have two problems to
deal with: How do you collect your animal's poop, and what do
you do with it once you have it in hand? Most dog owners have
been conditioned to clean up after their pets when they walk on
public streets and sidewalks. But it's just as important to dispose
properly of dog waste in your own backyard. Pet waste contains
bacteria that can contaminate local waterways if it washes from
your lawn into storm drains. In large enough quantities, this
pollution can remove oxygen from streams and rivers and
contribute to algal blooms, threatening marine life.
What should a dog owner do to prevent this from happening?
Experts recommend one of several options. First, you can dump
the waste down the toilet, since most sewage-treatment systems
can filter out the harmful bacteria. You can also bury the waste
in your yard at least 12 inches deep and then cover it with soil.
Or you can create a special composter for your dog waste—see
these instructions from the U.S. Department of Agriculture; just
make sure it's far away from any fruits and vegetables you might
be growing.
To move dog poop around, it's best to reuse old plastic shopping
bags. If you've made the better move of eliminating
polypropylene bags from your diet already, then try to find
boxes or bags that are made from bio matter.
For cat owners, things get more complicated. Cats that get
infected with a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii can shed that
organism's oocysts in their waste. (Most cats with toxoplasmosis
won't show any symptoms, so you might not know if your cat
has the disease.) According to research conducted in California,
Toxoplasma appears to have contributed to an uptick in the
deaths of wild sea otters in the past few years. (The parasite can
be toxic to humans, too, but as long as you wash your hands
after dealing with cat poop, you probably aren't at risk.) And
conventional sewage treatment doesn't appear to be effective in
filtering out the nasty bugs.
Skeptics have pointed out that cats haven't definitively been
identified as the culprit. They note that only 1 percent of cat
feces samples in one recent study carried Toxoplasma, that
indoor cats are especially unlikely to catch the parasite, and that
many infected otters may actually be dying of other causes. It's
also not clear how much Toxoplasma affects other kinds of
marine life. But pending further research, the Lantern thinks that
if your cat ever wanders outside the house, precaution merits
keeping its poop out of the toilet and out of your yard.
You're better off using kitty litter instead—but be careful about
which kind you use. Most is made of bentonite clay or its cousin,
fuller's earth; both materials are extracted through surface
mining, an environmentally taxing process. According to the
U.S. Geological Survey, about a quarter of all bentonite mined in
the United States and over half of all fuller's earth—nearly 2.5
million metric tons a year between the two—is used as an
absorbent for pet waste. Mining companies claim they can
regrow any vegetation removed during the extraction process,
but the scope of reclamation projects for Wyoming bentonite
suggests that the effects of strip mining can be significant.
Meanwhile, because the litter is nonbiodegradable, there's no
place for it to go but the landfill.
A better option would be litters that come from recycled
newspapers, wheat, corn cobs or reclaimed sawdust, assuming
you don't want to go about making your own. These litters—
along with the cat waste—can be composted, as long as you use
the right precautions, and they provide a good use of recycled
material. If you use liners for your litter box, you can find ones
made from biodegradable plastic. (Some owners complain about
their cats' reactions to green litters, so try them on a small scale
first and see what happens.)
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this
space every Tuesday.
the has-been
Too Broke To Fail
Why this crisis will make the next president better.
By Bruce Reed
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 4:16 AM ET
Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008
Someone's Better Off: With a deep recession
looming and the government going bust, the
widespread consensus is that the financial crisis
strikes a bitter blow to the presidential candidates'
grand policy ambitions. As Ted Widmer asked in
the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post,
"Why on Earth would anyone want to be president
right now?" The next president will have to spend
so much cleaning up the mess, he might be
tempted to let Treasury foreclose on the White
House.
Is the next president worse off than he was eight
days ago? In many respects, yes. No president can
do well if ordinary citizens are doing badly. A
number of national problems that were getting too
little attention before Black Monday will now sink
even deeper in the beleaguered next president's
stack.
Yet in the long run, our next leader may look back
on the current meltdown as the biggest break of
his presidency. While the next president's job just
got a bit more perilous, it also became a great deal
more important. And if President Obama or
President McCain is able to rise to the occasion,
this crisis could increase the odds that his time in
office will be a success.
Here are three reasons why, down the road, our
44th president might see the earth-shattering
economic news of the past week as not all bad:
1. It takes a crisis to change the tone in
Washington. Throughout their campaigns, Barack
Obama and John McCain both have promised to
put partisan politics aside and set a new tone in
Washington. The financial crisis seems to have
beaten them to the punch. Oddly enough, the two
campaigns spent much of the past week jabbing at
each other—while Republicans and Democrats back
in Washington sounded more notes of bipartisan
harmony than we've heard since 9/11.
That's not a coincidence. In normal times, the two
biggest deficits in Washington are urgency and
seriousness of purpose. In a crisis, those are no
longer in short supply. JFK once said the time to fix
the roof is when the sun is shining. But until the
rain starts, it's also much easier for the political
world not to notice any leak. On many public policy
issues in recent years—health care, Social Security,
climate change—the two sides have struggled even
to reach agreement on whether crisis was looming.
Not this time. You know it's a crisis when
conservatives start the bidding at $700 billion.
Because of their inherent uncertainty, crises tend
to force parties to hedge their bets, tamp down
ideological certitude, and be pragmatic. "There are
no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in
financial crises," says Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.
The good feeling doesn't last forever: A president
who wants to revive partisan rancor can do so in a
hurry, as Bush demonstrated in the nasty 2002
midterm elections. On the other hand, a president
who wants to keep the spirit of cooperation alive
can do so till the crisis goes away—a window that
might last awhile.
2. The next president will be too broke to fail.
Like Wall Street titans, presidents tend to think
more clearly when times are tight than when they
have money to burn. When George W. Bush
inherited a huge surplus, he squandered it in his
first six months. When Bill Clinton took office, by
contrast, all he inherited was a huge stack of IOUs.
That forced him to make a few tough, painful
decisions early in his presidency—which produced a
far bigger economic payoff for the country over the
long haul.
president could get a whole term to govern like
Paulson.
Exhausting as it sounds, that too could prove to be
a blessing in disguise. For the past two years,
Obama has worked hard to make the political world
safe for change. McCain, caught between a failed
brand and a reluctant base, is looking for ways to
make change his friend. The economic crisis will
give the winner an opportunity and obligation as
president to be a bolder agent of change than they
or their parties imagined.
For example, the current conventional wisdom
assumes that big-ticket items like health care and
distant challenges like Social Security must be put
on hold until the economy recovers. But the more
big new debts we take on in the short term, the
more important it will become to shore up our
financial stability over the long haul. For that
matter, if we do nothing about health care costs,
the auto industry could be next in line at the
Treasury window.
From tax reform to energy to modernizing
government, our economic woes will compel the
next president toward what FDR called "bold,
persistent experimentation." In the depths of the
Great Depression, Roosevelt chose that course for
a reason: When challenges we've never tackled
before start appearing at rates we've never seen,
bold experiments are our only hope of catching up.
We have to try new things, and keep trying until
we get it right.
All politicians dream of a world in which they don't
have to make choices. But for a president, having
to make choices can be a blessing, not a curse.
Bush would have done better fighting one war at a
time, not two. LBJ ran into trouble because he
thought he could afford both guns and butter. Most
successful presidents concentrate on getting one
thing done before moving onto the next item on
their to-do list. With no illusions of plenty, the next
president will be forced to focus his priorities and
invest his political capital well.
Shortly after the 1992 election, the Clinton
economic team met at Blair House to tell the
president-elect that he was about to inherit a far
bigger budget deficit than anticipated. He should
have been crestfallen, but surrounded by portraits
of FDR and other predecessors, he couldn't help
feeling inspired by the challenge. Let's hope, for his
own sake, the next president feels the same way.
... 4:25 A.M. (link)
3. Caution is not an option. Consider this: Henry
Paulson has proposed a more sweeping domestic
agenda in the last eight days than George W. Bush
proposed in the last eight years. The next
Ice Time: When Joe Lieberman became the first
Jewish vice-presidential nominee, Clyde Haberman
of the New York Times summed up the American
Jewish reaction as one of initial pride, followed
immediately by the question, "Is it good for the
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008
Jews?" When Mitt Romney launched his
presidential bid, he ran into similar worries from
many fellow members of the Church of Latter Day
Saints, who wondered if it would be good for the
Mormons.
So perhaps it's only natural that since Sarah Palin
emerged as the most famous hockey mom in
history, the reaction around the rink has been, is it
good for hockey?
Other sports have made their peace with politics.
For a century, major league baseball has asked
presidents to throw out the first pitch on Opening
Day. Both parties have elected retired football
players to Congress, the Super Bowl is a major
political event, and George W. Bush risked his life
to watch an NFL playoff game. Barack Obama
played basketball with troops; he and McCain both
hyped their NCAA tournament picks.
Yet aside from Team USA's gold-medal upset in the
1980 Olympics, the worlds of American politics and
hockey have tried their best not to collide. A few
politicians may tout the sport in hockey-mad states
like Alaska, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, and
John Kerry nearly brought his skates all the way to
the White House. But in general, the two arenas
have kept their distance, each viewing the other as
too rough, cold, and foreign.
Now comes Sarah Palin, who threatens to turn
hockey into the biggest celebrity spectator sport in
the world. Suddenly, "hip check" and Zamboni
have entered the political lexicon. Last week, the
New York Times examined the "hockey way of life,"
suggesting that in Alaska, the game is at best a
way to keep young people off the streets and at
worst the reason Bristol Palin got pregnant. This
week, hockey moms went viral with a Swift Boat
parody, "Hockey Moms for Truth."
As a fading hockey player and below-average
hockey dad, I have one reaction to the overnight
surge of media attention to our once obscure
game: Thanks, but no thanks! If we wanted to
become a political football, we would have signed
up for a different sport.
At first, the rush of Palin publicity seemed like a
boon for the game. Before she introduced herself
as "just your average hockey mom," "average"
wasn't the first word most often associated with
hockey parents. In popular culture, the more
common adjectives were "violent" and "homicidal."
USA Hockey, the governing body for the sport,
frets enough about the stereotype to run chill-out
ads like these.
What's more, ice hockey suffers from the same
problem as the Republican Party: not much of a
female fan base. The scoreboard company
Jumbotron makes the astonishing claim that only
22% of NHL fans are women. By comparison,
women make up nearly twice as big a share (43%)
of Major League Baseball fans, 41% of NBA fans,
40% of NASCAR fans, and 37% of NFL fans. (Hope
is on the way: Ice hockey is one of the fastest
growing women's sports.)
But after a few weeks under the media spotlight,
the hockey world is starting to remember why we
preferred our rinks dimly lit in the first place. Stu
Hackel, a hockey blogger for the New York Times,
wrote a long post recently on how much he resents
the game being dragged into politics and used as a
pawn. Several readers agreed -- and chided him
for dragging politics into a hockey blog.
Over at OnFrozenBlog, pucksandbooks tried to look
on the bright side: "If you love hockey, how can
you not like how hockey is being celebrated
(associated with perseverance and toughness) in
the rhetoric of 2008's political debates?" For
readers, however, pride was tempered by grave
concern about what the association with politics
might do to hockey's reputation.
In my experience, we hockey parents are already a
little grumpy from ice times that are too late or too
early. For many, the sudden attention just brings
up the sore subject of how little respect the sport
gets in the U.S. "You know hockey is never going
to be better than the fourth major sport," one
OnFrozenBlog reader lamented, recalling how
ESPN's SportsCenter used to make fans suffer
through golf highlights before getting around to the
NHL.
Then again, at least we don't live in Canada, where
politicians are always trying to put lipstick on a
puck. The current leader, Stephen Harper, is a selfstyled "hockey-dad-turned-Prime-Minister." A
Canadian hockey pol gets to have it both ways –
screaming at the refs now and then shows you're a
regular bloke, while sitting behind your kid on the
bench softens your image.
Yet even in Canada, the hockey schtick doesn't
play well in all quarters. With national elections a
month away, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran two
articles last week after an "exclusive interview"
with Harper. One piece discussed the Prime
Minister's views on NHL expansion, noting that he
has written an unpublished history of hockey. The
other article took a different tack: "During a
campaign stop at a winery in St-Eustache, Que.,
Mr. Harper, who many have called a Philistine, also
spoke at length about his life-long passion for
music and the piano." With great panache, Harper
recounted writing poetry, suffering as a pianist
from "nervous" hands, and overcoming one of the
most unusual childhood hard-luck stories in
political history: "For the first half year I was in
lessons, we didn't have a piano and I would
actually practice for my lessons on a cardboard
keyboard."
If politicians start saying the difference between a
hockey dad and a pit bull is a cardboard keyboard,
hockey parents might decide we liked our old
reputation better. ... 1:38 P.M. (link)
Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008
NASCAR on Ice: Every election, pollsters and
pundits introduce another voter group whose views
are certain to decide the outcome: soccer moms,
NASCAR dads, security moms, office park dads,
and (three times in the past week) Wal-Mart
moms. These categories, while sometimes useful,
share an important methodological flaw: On
Election Day, when undecided voters finally make
up their minds, exit pollsters don't ask them where
they work or where they shop, what sports they
watch or what games their children play. Exit polls
eschew these trendy questions in favor of boring
demographic perennials like age, race, gender,
education, and income level.
Precisely because exit poll questions don't change
much from one cycle to the next, however, they
provide an interesting portrait of how the
electorate evolves—or doesn't. Some segments of
the electorate are fiercely loyal to one party;
others lean toward one party but more dramatically
in some years than others.
According to exit polls, the most volatile swing
voter group over the last 20 years hasn't been
hockey moms like Sarah Palin, commuter dads like
Joe Biden, or soccer parents like Barack and
Michelle Obama. Over the last two decades, the
swing voters most prone to moving away from
Republicans in elections Democrats won and
toward Republicans in elections Republicans won
have been white men with a degree from high
school but not college. In other words, forget
Sarah Palin: In recent elections, the biggest
swingers looked more like her husband, Todd.
Democrats don't need to win a majority among
white men without bachelors' degrees, but it's
crucial to cut our losses. In 2000 and 2004,
Democrats lost that group by about 30 percent. In
the 2006 midterms, Democrats cut our losses in
half. In 1992, with some help from Ross Perot, we
managed to eke out a slim plurality. Because this
voting bloc still makes up nearly one-fifth of the
electorate, losing them by 30 points instead of 15
means a shift the size of George W. Bush's margin
over John Kerry. The only group with a swing that
comes close is white women with the same
educational profile, who turn out in greater
numbers but are less likely to switch sides.
Of course, past performance is no guarantee of
future results, especially in a path-breaking year
like this one. The Obama campaign has invested
heavily in registering and turning out new voters,
while the McCain campaign carries the albatross of
an old, unpopular GOP brand. In an economy this
troubled, and after an administration this bad, all
kinds of voters who went Republican in the past
should be up for grabs. Then again, that might be
yet another reason men with no college degree
should be among the most up-for-grabs of all.
So far, Todd Palin has attracted as much attention
for his looks and his nickname as for his politics.
No one knows whether he joined the Alaskan
Independence Party because he wanted a vote on
statehood, was a Perot supporter fed up with the
two parties, or just liked this one's quirky platform:
"The AIP supports fishing!" Sarah Palin called her
husband "a story all by himself"—fisherman, oil
worker, snowmobiler, part Eskimo, and perhaps
the first person ever to be cheered by a Republican
Convention for belonging to the United
Steelworkers Union.
The current vice-presidential spouse, Lynne
Cheney, grew up in a small Western town, got a
Ph.D., and used it to write racy novels. Todd's
passion is the 2,000-mile, NASCAR-on-ice Tesoro
Iron Dog. Last year, he told the AP that his
principal cause as First Dude of Alaska was
expanding training for noncollege workers: "For
those of us who learn by touching and tearing stuff
apart and for those who don't have the financial
background to go to college, just being a product
of that on-the-job training is really important."
Noncollege men aren't going to vote Republican
just because they identify with Todd Palin—and in
any case, he's hardly the stereotypical workingclass swing voter. He's now a registered
Republican, married to a passionately conservative
one. Before he left his job as a production operator
for BP, he was earning between $100,000 and
$120,000 a year—about three times the Census
Bureau average for men who haven't finished
college. In contrast to the Lower 48, Alaska
remains a land of opportunity where it is still
possible to succeed beyond one's wildest dreams
through what the AP called "a lifetime of manual
labor." Many of my high-school classmates in
Idaho headed north for the same reason.
The trouble with the GOP argument is that so far,
their only plan to boost the incomes of noncollege-graduates is the one Todd Palin came up
with on his own 20 years ago: work in Alaska!
So in the rush to court more familiar voters,
Democrats shouldn't concede Dude Dads to the
Republicans. Democrats may not have a First Dude
on the ticket, but we have a good plan to help the
forgotten middle class do better again. The next
president needs to help the United States build the
job-rich industries of the future, such as new
energy-efficient technologies, and give Americans
what Rep. Rahm Emanuel calls "a new deal for the
new economy": health care they can afford, a
401(k) pension they can keep, a tax cut they've
earned, and the chance to get more training and
send their kids to college.
In this campaign, Americans have heard more than
enough about the Bridge to Nowhere. What
millions of voters want out of this election is a
bridge to somewhere. A bridge to the 21st century
would be a good place to start. ... 5:19 p.m. (link)
Saturday, August 30, 2008
The New Frontier: Flush from a pitch-perfect convention week
and a crescendo of can-you-top-this speeches by Bidens,
Clintons, and Obamas, Democrats in Denver had no trouble
bounding out of bed Friday morning. After running up the score
at Invesco Field on Thursday night, our biggest worry was
getting penalized for excessive celebration. Then, just when the
party thought its luck couldn't get any better, John McCain's
choice of an obscure rookie governor sent Democrats popping
champagne corks all over again. Giddy partisans rushed to the
phones and microphones to trash Palin as "Geraldine Quayle."
I wasn't so quick to jump for joy. For one thing, I would have
rather spent the fall poking fun at Mitt Romney, and got my
hopes up when his stock soared to 80% in the political futures
market shortly before the Palin announcement. Alas, passing up
Romney deprives us of the perfect slogan: "Four More Houses!"
While we weren't able to elect the first presidential android, his
supporters and I can take heart that thanks to his campaign, there
are now 4.7 million cracks in that plastic ceiling.
For me, the choice of Sarah Palin cuts a little too close to home.
She was born a few miles from where I grew up, went to junior
college in my hometown, and has now eclipsed Deep Throat and
Larry Craig as the most famous graduate in University of Idaho
history. It's as if the McCain campaign were micro-targeting my
wife's demographic: exercise-crazed hockey moms from Idaho
who married their high school sweethearts. The Obama
campaign can rest assured – universes don't get much smaller
than that.
As governor, Sarah Palin helped stop the Bridge to Nowhere.
Now she's the Candidate from Nowhere. That's a steep climb for
any candidate, even one who shoots moose and runs marathons.
Before every VP selection, the only people willing to talk about
the choice don't know anything. With Palin, that was still pretty
much the case even after her announcement. Republican
congressman Mike Simpson doesn't know her, but told the Idaho
Statesman, "She's got Idaho roots, and an Idaho woman is
tough."
If national security experience is the measure of a potential
Commander-in-Chief, Palin has an extraordinarily high burden
to prove. To paraphrase the words Lloyd Bentsen used to destroy
the last surprise vice-presidential choice, she's no Joe Biden.
But for a host of reasons, Democrats needn't rush to run down
Sarah Palin. Obama seemed to come to that conclusion Friday
afternoon, striking the right tone after Democrats had gone after
her with a few early hip checks. Both Obama and Biden called
Palin to wish her good luck, but not too much. Hillary Clinton
echoed that Palin's "historic nomination" would nevertheless
take the country in the wrong direction.
Why hold back? First, as Obama himself demonstrated in
winning the Democratic nomination, 2008 is a tough year to
handicap the relative virtues of being a fresh face and having
experience. The natural reflex is to brand Palin as too great a
risk. But McCain is practically begging our side to throw him
into that briar patch. Convinced he can't win as a candidate of
the status quo, he wants everyone to know he's willing to take a
risk.
Second, anyone going after Palin for the important experience
she lacks had better be careful not to dismiss the value of the
experiences she does have. Raising a large family and running a
small state may not be sufficient qualifications to assume the
Presidency. But we're not going to get far by minimizing those
jobs, either. Here again, the McCain campaign may be hoping
that Democrats – or the press – will come down too hard on
Palin, and spark a backlash that turns her into a working mom's
hero.
Third, and most important, voters don't need our help to figure
this out. In the end, they'll be the best and toughest judge of
whether or not Sarah Palin is ready. Back in 1988, the Dukakis
campaign actually ran an ad against Dan Quayle. It didn't work,
and wasn't necessary. In any case, Quayle had only himself to
blame for falling flat on the national stage. By straining so hard
to compare himself to JFK on the campaign trail, he practically
wrote Bentsen's famous line for him.
In fact, Quayle never recovered from his debut at the '88
convention, when voters witnessed his deer-in-the-headlights
moment. Over the next few days and in the vice-presidential
debate, Palin's reputation will be shaped in much the same way –
by whether she can take the heat, or looks like a moose hunter in
the headlights. … 1:38 A.M. (link)
Friday, August 22, 2008
Spoiler Alert: When the McCain campaign floated the idea of a
pro-choice running mate, social conservatives reacted with the
same outrage they've been rehearsing for 40 years: Some
threatened to bolt at the convention; others said they'd rather lose
the election than expand the Republican tent. "If he picks a prochoice running mate, it's not going to be pretty," Rush Limbaugh
warned.
But the most explosive threat comes from former right-hand-ofGod Ralph Reed, in his new novel, Dark Horse, a "political
thriller" that imagines this very scenario. Spoiler alert! Just hours
after forcing his party to swallow a pro-choice VP, the
Republican presidential nominee in Reed's pot-boiler is brutally
murdered by radical Islamic terrorists at the GOP Convention.
Reed's implicit threat to Republican candidates: The Christian
right has so much power, they can even get someone else's God
to strike you down.
Reed doesn't just kill off the character who named a pro-choice
running mate—he has the running mate go on to destroy the
Republican Party. For the Republicans (and the reader), the plot
goes from bad to worse. With the pro-choice figure—an
African-American war hero named David Petty—now at the top
of the Republican ticket, evangelical leaders throw their support
behind Calif. Gov. Bob Long, who just lost the Democratic
nomination at a brokered convention and decided to run as an
independent after going through a religious conversion in the
chapel of the hospital where his daughter nearly lost her baby.
Petty offends evangelicals, while Long—obviously a quick
study—wows them with the depth of his knowledge of the Bible.
Petty's candidacy implodes when a YouTube clip shows him
telling Iowans that his support for the GOP abortion plank is
only symbolic. Days before the election, voters also learn that as
defense secretary, Petty convinced a no-bid contractor to hire a
lobbyist who moonlights as his mistress and madam of an
exclusive Washington brothel.
Reed's clear warning: If you put a pro-choice Republican on the
ticket, don't be surprised when he turns out to be a lying,
cheating, no-bid-earmarking john.
By contrast, Reed's evangelicals love Long, who woos them with
parables and waffles on abortion. "I've heard through the
grapevine that he's become a Christian," says televangelist Andy
Stanton, a composite of Limbaugh and Pat Robertson. "He may
be someone we can do business with." With Stanton's
enthusiastic blessing, Long sweeps the South and beats Petty 2to-1 among evangelicals.
All three candidates come up short of 270 electoral votes, so the
election goes to the House of Representatives. Even though
Republicans control the House, Petty loses when Republican
members of the evangelical caucus support Long instead. The
message to McCain: Social conservatives will gladly support a
maverick, as long as he says what they want to hear on their
issues.
Of course, John McCain doesn't need to curl up with a Ralph
Reed roman à clef to know that social conservatives won't budge
on abortion. The more interesting question is why my evil twin
decided to write the Great Republican Novel in the first place.
True to his own life story, the book suffers from too much plot
and not enough character. But it's not nearly as bad as I'd hoped,
and it's chock-full of accidental revelations:






Ralph expects the Republicans to lose the White House
in 2008 but win it back in 2012 and 2016. By the time
the book takes place, Democrats haven't carried a single
Southern state in five straight elections (2000 through
2016), and a Republican president who is retiring after
two terms reminisces fondly about how "I did what I
had to do" to win the 2012 election. Alas, his "botched
effort to overthrow the Iranian government" inspires the
terrorist attack on the 2020 GOP convention.
Much as social conservatives and neocons can't stand
liberals and the media, most of all they hate each other.
Reed's hapless Republican nominee insists that "this
election is about terrorism, not social issues" and
doesn't hide his contempt for social conservative
leaders and "their self-importance, single-issue litmus
tests, and insufferable sense of entitlement."
Meanwhile, social conservatives view themselves as
"abused spouses" trapped in a "self-destructive
codependence" with "the spineless wonders" who run
the Republican Party. Reed says the Reagan formula
can't save the GOP anymore: "A pro-business party
with the religious right grafted in like a wild olive plant,
it no longer appeals to the center of the country."
Money-grubbing consultants are obsessed with alcohol,
drugs, and sex. Long's adman is arrested for snorting
cocaine, and his top strategist nearly costs his candidate
the election by shacking up with a spy from a rival
campaign.
Novel-writing operatives, by contrast, are obsessed only
with sex. Reed tries his best to turn social conservative
politics into steamy beach reading. In Dark Horse, the
operative always gets the girl, and she is invariably
"bronzed," with swaying hips and tight designer
clothes. One femme fatale is "a brunette lollipop" who
captures her prey with lines like, "I thought I was
dessert."
Apparently, Reed does not have much experience
courting the women's vote. Long's wife is an alcoholic
who's upset that he found God. The Democratic VP
candidate is a lightweight who can't remember her
party's position on Iran. Two campaign operatives
refuse to discuss their grand jury testimony but stop to
answer press questions about the designer outfits they're
wearing.
Reed enjoyed running the Christian Coalition more than
humping corporate accounts for Jack Abramoff. He
writes himself into the book as a minor character named
Ross Lombardy, "a veritable computer hard drive of
political trivia" and "strategist-cum-organizer with a
killer instinct who could quote 200 Bible verses from
memory" and "had an uncanny ability to cite the precise
vote percentages in every key U.S. House and Senate

race in the previous three election cycles." The
Abramoff character, G.G. Hoterman, is a corrupt,
ruthless multimillionaire lobbyist who crushes anyone
who gets in his way. "Politics has a way of
criminalizing the normative," Hoterman complains.
Reed writes knowingly of the "time-honored
Washington tradition" of "expressing false regret at the
misfortune of someone caught in a scandal, when the
truth was everyone enjoyed it." With a twinge of
bitterness, he adds that "Washington scandals burn like
funeral pyres, and only go out after the angry mob has
tossed someone to the flames to pacify the gods.
That pyre suggests Ralph's next move. It's time to gin up the
social conservative movement to forget about McCain's running
mate and wake up to the GOP-bashing, sex-peddling novelist in
their midst. Nothing could do more for slumping sales than an
urgent edict from the religious right: Burn this book! ... 3:58
P.M. (link)
Monday, August 11, 2008
It's Your Money: Over the next two weeks, the
Obama and McCain campaigns will spend an
impressive $11 million to advertise during the
Olympics. Obama's first ad, "Hands," outlines his
plan for a green economy. McCain's attacks Obama
on taxes. Both ads reflect the campaigns'
respective game plans, although Obama's fits in
much better with the upbeat not-the-triumph-butthe-struggle spirit of the games that surround it.
If I had a few million to help NBC fill the time
between tape delays, I might go after a topic that
is on most American viewers' minds during these
games and that seems destined to weigh heavily
on the next president: China.
When the 2008 campaign started a few lifetimes
ago, this election appeared to be all about China—
or, at least, about the long-term competitive
challenge that the emerging economic superpowers
of China and India pose to the American way of
life. But a host of urgent short-term economic
problems have pushed our long-term economic
challenges aside. For the moment, falling housing
prices, rising gas prices, and soaring credit-card
debts have made us more concerned about the
threat the American way of life poses to the
American way of life.
But if our next president ever gets done cleaning
up after our current one, he'll confront China's
growing shadow on issue after issue. While the
United States can make an enormous difference by
finally doing its part on climate change, the
Chinese have already passed us as the largest
producer of greenhouse gases, and our ability and
willingness to make progress will depend in part on
theirs. Meanwhile, China's rising demand for oil to
fuel its relentless economic growth will continue to
cost us at the pump.
tough to pay your bills. But take heart: You already
paid China's."
When the next president decides what to do about
education reform in the United States, China
should be on his mind. The Chinese education
system churns out 5 million college graduates a
year, while we still paper over our high-school
dropout rate and look away as half a million of the
young people we send to college every year never
finish.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Perhaps most urgently, the next president will have to admit
what George W. Bush would not—that if we don't
put our fiscal house in order, China will foreclose
on it. As Obama has pointed out, "It's very hard to tell
your banker that he's wrong." This year's federal budget deficit
will be a record $500 billion, not counting wars and
economic bailouts. One of history's headlines on
this administration will be, "Bush Owes to China."
The rise of China is the story of this Olympics and
threatens to be the story of the next presidency.
So it's only fitting to give viewers a sense of what's
at stake.
My dream ad would show the robot Wall-E
methodically stacking pressed blocks of discarded
dollar bills to form giant structures, which turn out
to be the Bird's Nest stadium, the Water Cube
aquatic center, and the CCTV tower. The script
would go something like this:
"Sponsor" (60 seconds)
Voiceover: "Ever wonder what Washington has
done with your tax dollars? This Olympics is your
chance to find out. For the last 8 years, the Bush
administration has been paying China billions of
dollars in interest on the trillions it borrowed for
tax breaks, pork, and special privileges you never
got. That money helped create thousands of
businesses and millions of jobs—in China. So as
you enjoy the games, keep an eye on your tax
dollars at work. The way our economy's going, it's
Tagline: "America's Taxpayers. Proud Sponsors of
the Beijing Olympics."
What's an Olympics without a little national pride?
And with any luck, NBC might refuse to run it. …
10:30 A.M. (link)
Trader Mitt: As if John McCain didn't have enough
reason to keep quoting JFK's line that life isn't fair,
consider this: According to the political futures
markets, Mitt Romney now has a better chance of
being McCain's running mate than McCain has of
winning.
Since the primaries, Romney has steadily gained
ground in the VP sweepstakes through hard work
and a disciplined message: He'll help on the
economy, he grew up in the swing state of
Michigan, and he makes his current home in the
right wing of the Republican Party. He seems at
ease with the unattractive chores of being the vicepresidential nominee: raising money, playing the
attack dog, telling the base what it wants to hear.
On paper, Romney's VP bid looks as picture perfect
as his presidential campaign once did. Yet even as
Mitt watchers revel in the current boomlet, we
can't help wondering whether this Romneymania
will last.
With that in mind, Romneystas everywhere need to
start making new and urgent arguments on his
behalf:

The French Are Coming!: Romney was
widely mocked last fall when he warned that
France posed a clear and present danger to
the American way of life. But after watching
French President Nicolas Sarkozy embrace
Barack Obama in Paris last week,
conservatives may finally warm to Mitt's
"First, Not France" slogan after all. Romney
has impeccable credentials as a
Francophobe; Sarkozy would never dream
of saying of him, "If he is chosen, then
France will be delighted." In a few short
hours in Paris, Obama claimed the president


as a convert. Romney spent two whole
years in France and converted no one
whatsoever.
Leave 'Em Laughing as You Go: One of
McCain's heroes, Mo Udall, loved to tell the
story of primary voters who heard him say,
"I'm Mo Udall and I'm running for
president," and responded, "We were just
laughing about that this morning." Poor Mo
wouldn't know what to make of this
campaign. Two months into the general
election, nobody's laughing about anything.
No one much wants to joke about Obama or
McCain. If Romney were the VP, pundits
across the spectrum would exult that at last
they had someone fun to mess with. He's a
good sport and a happy square, with a track
record of supplying ample new material.
WALL-E's World: Mitt Romney's Web site
is a shadow of its former self—no Five
Brothers blog, no ad contests, no
animatronic Mitt messages for your
voicemail. Yet like WALL-E's stash of
charming knickknacks, the few surviving
objects on Planet Romney carry greater
meaning. For example, a striking photo
highlights a strength few politicians reveal:
Unlike McCain, Mitt Romney was born to
read a teleprompter. In the official
campaign photo of him rehearsing his
concession speech, Mitt is barely visible. All
the focus is on the words in big type to be
loaded on the prompter.
McCain doesn't much like giving speeches and
treats teleprompters accordingly. But you can see
how a campaign that has struggled to follow a
script might be tempted by the first completely
programmable running mate. In 2000, McCain
often joked that he was Luke Skywalker. This time,
Romney could be his C3PO. ... 12:47 p.m. (link)
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Make My Day: What a difference a month makes.
At its June meeting, the D.C. City Council debated
Mayor Adrian Fenty's emergency legislation to ban
sparklers. After the Supreme Court struck down
the city's gun ban, the Council spent last week's
July meeting debating emergency legislation to let
residents own handguns. Here in the District, we
couldn't shoot off firecrackers over the Fourth
because they're too dangerous, but we can now
keep a loaded pistol by our bedside, ready to shoot
down prowlers in self-defense.
Like most D.C. residents, I have no plans to
stockpile guns in the wake of the Supreme Court
decision. But if the city wants to take away my
sparklers, they'll have to pry them from my cold,
dead, slightly charred hands.
When I was growing up, the rights to keep and
bear firearms and fireworks went hand in hand. My
grandmother used a revolver to shoot garter
snakes in her garden. Well into her eighties,
however, her greatest pleasure in life was to spend
the Fourth setting off massive strings of
firecrackers, 200 at a time. When she came to
visit, she'd step off the airplane with a suitcase full
of firecrackers purchased on an Indian reservation.
As soon as we got home, she'd light the fuse with
her cigarette, then squeal with delight as serial
explosions made the gravel in our driveway dance.
In recent years, firearm regulation and firework
regulation have gone their separate ways. The
National Rifle Association has successfully opposed
most gun laws, even ones aimed primarily at
criminals. Armed with Justice Scalia's maddeningly
unhelpful ruling on the D.C. ban, the NRA already
has begun to target the rest.
By contrast, although fireworks aren't nearly as
deadly as guns, the government treats them like
what they are – a widely popular, sometimes
dangerous American tradition. The federal
government long ago banned once-commonplace
explosives like cherry bombs. Most states – even
the libertarian bastion of Idaho – have banned or
restricted the use of firecrackers. According to the
website AmericanPyro, five states, including Iowa
and Illinois, permit only sparklers and snakes. Five
others, including New York and Massachusetts,
allow no consumer fireworks whatsoever. In general,
states insist that fireworks must be "safe and sane"
– a balance that has been all but impossible to
strike with firearms.
Thanks to the enduring power of pyromania, sales
haven't suffered. Since 1976, fireworks
consumption has increased ten-fold, while
fireworks-related injuries have dropped. Fireworks
manufacturers can take heart in knowing that this
year's survivors are next year's customers.
Because there is no Second Amendment right to
keep and bear sparklers, fireworks law is a
straightforward balancing test – between the
individual right to burn a hole in the back porch
and the mutual responsibility not to burn entire
communities to the ground, the personal freedom
to pyromaniacal self-expression and the personal
responsibility not to harm oneself and others.
These days, the fireworks industry has more to
fear from climate change than from the authorities.
This summer, the threat of wildfires led Arnold
Schwarzenegger to ask Californians to boycott
fireworks. Drought forced John McCain to forego
fireworks at his annual Independence Day
barbecue in Arizona.
The trouble with the Supreme Court ruling in the
Heller case is not that it interprets the Second
Amendment as an individual right. The Second
Amendment is the constitutional equivalent of the
grammatical paradox Eats Shoots & Leaves, but
whatever the Founders meant by its muddy
wording and punctuation, most Americans now
take it for granted. The real problem with the
Court's decision is that the balancing test for gun
rights and responsibilities is even less clear than
before. Scalia's opinion devotes 30 pages to a
grammatical history of the Second Amendment and
a single sentence to how the courts should apply it
to most other gun laws already on the books.
Alongside such vast imprecision, the Court went
out of its way to strike down the requirement for
trigger locks – an extraordinarily modest attempt
to balance freedom and safety. Trigger locks can
help prevent gun accidents and keep guns out of
the hands of children. Far from impeding selfdefense, new trigger locks can be unlocked with a
fingerprint or a special ring on the gun owner's
finger. That means today's gun owner can arm
himself to shoot an intruder in an instant –
compared to the 30 seconds or more it took to load
a pistol or musket in the 18th Century.
Over the long term, it's not clear how much of a
boon the Heller decision will be for gun rights
advocates. In winning the case, the gun lobby lost
its most potent argument – the threat that at any
moment, the government will knock on the door
and take your guns away. With that bogeyman out
of the way, the case for common-sense gun safety
measures is stronger than ever. Perhaps now the gun
debate will revolve around more practical and less
incendiary issues, like what can be done to reduce
illegal gun trafficking and trace guns used in
crimes.
If it's any small consolation, the real winners in
Heller may turn out to be the sparkler lobby. If
cities have trouble banning handguns, they will be
hard-pressed to take away sparklers. Of course, as
with guns, the threat to sparklers may well have
been exaggerated. The D.C. Council rejected Mayor
Fenty's sparkler ban by a vote of 11-2, as members
nostalgically recalled playing with them in their
youth. Councilman and former mayor Marion Barry
voted no "with a bang." As Barry knows, there are
worse things in life to light than a sparkler. ... 9:51
A.M. (link)
Friday, June 6, 2008
The Fight of Her Life: Ten years ago, at a White
House farewell for a favorite staff member, Hillary
Clinton described the two kinds of people in the
world: born optimists like her husband who see the
glass as half-full, and born realists like herself who
can see the glass is half-empty.
As she ends her campaign and throws her support
behind Barack Obama's remarkable quest, Hillary
could be forgiven for seeing her glass as, quite
literally, half-empty. The two candidates traded
primary after primary down the stretch, two titans
matching each other vote for vote. In the closest
race in the modern era, she and Obama split the
Democratic wishbone nearly right down the middle,
but she's not the one who got her wish.
Yet for Hillary and the 18 million of us who
supported her, there is no shame in one historic
campaign coming up just short against another.
History is a great deal wiser than Chris Matthews,
and will be kinder, too. The 2008 contest has been
one for the ages, and the annals will show that
Hillary Clinton has gained far more than she lost.
The Obama-Clinton match will go down as the
longest, closest, most exciting, most exhausting
ever. Obama ran an inspired campaign and seized
the moment. Clinton came close, and by putting up
a tough fight now, helped fortify him for the fight
ahead.
Our campaign made plenty of mistakes, none of
which has gone unreported. But Hillary is right not
to dwell on "woulda, coulda, shoulda." From New
Hampshire to South Dakota, the race she ran
earned its own place in the history books.
While the way we elect presidents leaves a lot to
be desired, it has one redeeming virtue, as the
greatest means ever invented to test what those
who seek the job are made of. In our lifetimes,
we'll be hard-pressed to find a candidate made of
tougher stuff than Hillary Clinton. Most candidates
leave a race diminished by it. Hillary is like
tempered steel: the more intense the heat, the
tougher she gets.
And has any candidate had to face fiercer, more
sustained heat? As a frontrunner, she expected a
tough ride, and as Hillary Clinton, she was
accustomed to it. But if she was used to the
scrutiny, she could not have anticipated – and did
not deserve – the transparent hostility behind it. In
much the same way the right wing came unglued
when her husband refused to die in the '90s, the
media lost its bearings when she defied and
survived them. Slate at least held off on its
noxious Hillary Deathwatch until March; most of
the press corps began a breathless Clinton
Deathwatch last Thanksgiving. The question that
turned her campaign around in New Hampshire –
"How do you do it?" – brought Hillary to tears out
of sheer gratitude that someone out there had
noticed.
For a few searing days in New Hampshire, we
watched her stare into the abyss. Any other
candidate forced to read her own obituary so often
would have come to believe it. But as she went on
to demonstrate throughout this campaign, Hillary
had faith that there is life after political death, and
the wherewithal to prove it.
In New Hampshire, she discarded the frontrunner
mantle and found her voice. For a race that was
largely won or lost in Iowa, the discovery came a
few days too late. But the grit Clinton showed with
her back to the wall all those months will make her
a force with a following for years to come.
The chief hurdle for Clinton's presidential bid
wasn't whether she could do the job; Democrats
never doubted she would make a good president.
Ironically, the biggest question she faced for much
of the race is one she answered clearly by the time
she left it: whether America was ready for a
woman president. No one asks that question any
longer. For all the sexism she encountered as the
first woman with a serious shot at the White
House, voters themselves made clear they were
ready. The longer the race went on, the more
formidable she looked in the general election. In
this week's CBS News poll, she was beating John
McCain by nine points, even as she was losing the
Democratic nomination.
Last year, the press and other campaigns insisted
that Clinton was too polarizing and that half the
country was united against her. Now, a woman
who was supposed to be one of the most polarizing
figures in America leaves the race with handsome
leads over McCain in places like North Carolina, a
state her husband never carried.
When her campaign started, aides often described
Hillary as the least known, least understood
famous person in America. During this campaign, it
became clear that in certain quarters she's the
most deliberately misunderstood person as well.
The recent RFK flap was yet another attempt to
suggest that her every miscue was part of some
diabolical master plan.
Yet while talking heads imagined the evils of Hillary
Clinton, voters finally came to know and
understand her. They saw someone who knew
what they were going through, who would stick
with them, fight for them, and get back up when
she got knocked down. The phony, consultantdriven shadow boxing of the last few years has
dulled Democrats to the party's historic mission –
to defend the values and stand up for the interests
of ordinary people who are doing all they can just
to get ahead. For those voters, Hillary Clinton was
the champion they've been looking for, a fighter
they can count on, win or lose, not to let them
down.
That's a fight she'll never quit. Like the woman in
New Hampshire, we still wonder how Hillary does
it, but this time, the tears are on us. As we wish
her well, our hopes are high, our hearts are full –
and if our glass is empty, it was worth every drop.
... 11:58 P.M. (link)

Friday, May 30, 2008
The Adventures of Bobble-Foot: For enough
money, any McClellan or Stephanopoulos in
Washington will write a kiss-and-tell book these
days. But the memoir Larry Craig just announced
he's writing could launch a whole new genre:
don't-kiss, don't-tell.
Craig revealed his plans on Boise television during
Tuesday's coverage of the Senate primary to
choose his potential successors. For the senator, if
not his viewers, it was a poignant moment, one
last point of no return in a three-decade-long
political career.
With a touch of empathy, the local reporter told
Craig, "You're looking forward now to a much
different life for yourself." Alas, the life Craig
described isn't much different from any other
retiring pol's, nor does he sound like he's looking
forward to it. He hinted that he is entertaining a
number of lobbying offers. Because of ethics rules,
he explains, "There are some one-way
conversations going on, 'cause I've said I can't
talk, but I certainly can listen." Perhaps they can
figure out some kind of code.

These are heady times for the Idaho senator. Last
Sunday, on National Tap Dance Day, the first-place
St. Paul Saints, a minor league baseball team,
drew their biggest crowd of the year with a special
promotion in Craig's honor: a bobble-foot doll
commemorating the bathroom stall at MinneapolisSt.Paul airport. The team website reported, "Saints
Have Toe-Tapping Good Time, Win 9-3."
The bobble-foot promotion gave Craig a way to
test his market value even beyond the lobbying
and book worlds. Scores of Craig bobble-feet are
now available on eBay, selling for upwards of $75
apiece. You'd better hurry: Like successful appeals
of uncoerced confessions, supplies are limited.
The upcoming memoir may be the last we ever
hear from the man, so it's worth asking: What kind
of book will Larry Craig write? Consider the
possibilities:

The Broken Branch: Left to his own devices
(never a good idea), Craig seems likely to
write an insiders' version of the woe-isgridlock lament popularized most recently
by political scientists Norm Ornstein and
Tom Mann. "The thing that's important for
someone with my experience to talk about
is the state of politics in Washington," Craig
said Tuesday. "It's created what I call a
extremely dysfunctional, hyperpartisan
Senate. We're getting little to nothing
done." Craig cites immigration and energy
policy. As his agent and editor will surely
tell him, this sober approach is not the way
for Craig to put his best foot forward. No
one wants to read the case for decisive
action written by a man who claimed his
innocence after pleading guilty and
remained in office after promising to quit.
Then again, Craig might not be a household
word if he had listened to the advice of
Ornstein and Mann, who urged members to
bring their families to live with them in
Washington.
The Packwood Diaries: With slight
modifications, Craig has modeled his entire
Senate career after his friend, former
Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood. Craig sobbed on
the Senate floor the day Packwood resigned.
Packwood dug in his heels and remained in
office for three years after his sex scandal
became public. Craig has done the same,
and is only leaving because his term is up.
Considering how much Packwood served as
his role model, it's possible that Craig tried
to emulate another part of the Oregonian's
legacy: the Packwood diaries. Packwood
kept a meticulous journal of all his exploits,
with an eye to history and none on the
lookout for satire or federal prosecution. We
can only hope Craig has done the same.
What Happened: Every publisher is looking
for the next Scott McClellan, who told lies
for a living but was scared straight after his
escape. Craig could play this role with
gusto. The pitch: It wasn't his idea to stand
up in front of the press time after time and
insist he wasn't gay. Karl Rove made him do
it, in a deliberate cover-up to protect the
Republican brand – and he'll never forgive
Rove for it.

If I Did It: O.J. Simpson never got to keep a
dime of his controversial book, If I Did It:
Confessions of the Killer. Craig, on the other
hand, could hypothesize all the way to the
bank. Senators love to write loosely
autobiographical fiction. Gary Hart and Bill
Cohen wrote The Double Man about a
politician who wanted to be president.
Barbara Boxer wrote A Time to Run about a
woman who becomes a liberal senator from
California. Craig could write a great book
about an imaginary conservative senator
who happens to be gay. His hypothetical
musings would wow the critics and sell like
crazy. Besides, what does Craig have to
lose? Hinting he did it would be no more an
admission of guilt than the misdemeanor
plea he was just kidding us about last June.
... 8:48 P.M. (link)
the spectator
Shakespeare's Bootlegger, Dylan's
Biographer, Nabokov, and Me
When should an unauthorized version be authorized?
By Ron Rosenbaum
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 5:02 PM ET
There's a new Dylan album—well, the eighth volume in the socalled "Bootleg Series"—coming out Oct. 7. The albums in the
Bootleg Series, you probably know, each contain a selection
from the vast corpus of unreleased tracks, variant versions, live
performances, and the like that had previously been circulated, if
at all, on unauthorized, semi-legal tapes and CDs. The Bootleg
Series is the authorized version of the unauthorized versions.
I personally have never bought a bootleg, but I've listened to
some. (There's even a bootleg titled with a memorable Dylan
quote from an interview with me: "Thin Wild Mercury.")
With the Bootleg Series, though, the Dylan organization has
cleverly managed to monetize a significant portion of the vast
congeries of unauthorized recordings by giving fans access to
cleaned-up versions of the outlaw music. Depending on your
point of view, the black market in unauthorized bootlegs—as
opposed to authorized unauthorized bootlegs—either
democratized the distribution of the music or denied the artist his
hard-earned dues. Or both.
For my money, I hope both enterprises continue to thrive.
Dylan's selection of particular works for "authorization" can
perhaps provide clues to what he values about his work, hints
about the evolution of his writing and performance—recasting
our view, for instance, of what he called his shift from
unconscious to conscious songwriting.
And I'm glad the authorized bootleg profits have helped to
stabilize the once-chaotic financial arrangements in Dylanworld, serving to support his quixotic "Never Ending Tour" and
allowing him to take on nonmusical projects like the stillastonishing autobiography Chronicles. (Dylan plans to deliver
the second volume next spring, according to a source at his
publisher, and mine, Simon and Schuster.)
In the course of checking on this, I learned of another
forthcoming Dylan release: In November, Simon and Schuster
will issue a recently rediscovered Dylan literary effort, a book of
some 23 poems from the '60s inspired by photographer Barry
Feinstein's moody black-and-white shots of Hollywood. Not
exactly a bootleg (you may have seen two of the poems
excerpted in The New Yorker recently) but new light on his mind
at the time.
But this isn't primarily a column about Dylan—although it's
interesting the way Dylan is turning into a kind of never-ending
artist, the Philip Roth of iconic singer-songwriters. But Dylan
culture, especially Dylan bootleg culture, figures into the way
we assess "authorized" and "unauthorized" work by other great
artists such as Shakespeare and Nabokov. (No, I'm not equating
them.) Let me explain.
I recently learned from one of the foremost Dylan biographers,
Clinton Heylin, that he has a book coming out next year on
Shakespeare's sonnets, which he believes will illuminate an
enduring—and significant— Shakespeare mystery: whether the
original 1609 edition of the sonnets was authorized by
Shakespeare or is, in effect, an unauthorized, 17 th-century
bootleg. Heylin told me he plans to argue that the 1609 edition
was a bootleg. Not (please!) an edition authored by "someone
other than Shakespeare," as the "anti-Stratfordian" (or someoneelse-wrote-Shakespeare) cult believes but an edition published—
authorized—by someone other than Shakespeare. (Some have
argued that Shakespeare circulated the sonnets only privately
among friends because of the potentially scandalous homoerotic
content of some.)
Why does it matter whether the sonnets were authorized or
bootlegged? Because if the sonnets were not published
deliberately by Shakespeare, perhaps we would spend less time
arguing about the order of the 154 poems. And there would be
less justification for the enormous amounts of time the
biographical fetishists devote to spinning stories from that order,
figuring out the identities of the real "fair youth"—the subject of
a number of homoerotic sonnets—and the real "dark lady"—the
subject of a number of embittered ones.
We might instead pay closer attention to each individual sonnet
as an aesthetic whole, rather than trying to assess what each one
"means" in relation to the sonnets that come before and after and
the supposed relationships they parallel and chronicle.
I don't deny that there are linkages in imagery, theme, and
language among the sonnets. But it would be helpful, I think, to
get rid of the distortions of gossip.
Heylin believes he will prove who, in fact, bootlegged the
sonnets, but he wants to keep the identity—and motive—of the
culprit secret until closer to his publication day next year in May
2009, the 400th anniversary of the sonnets' first publication.
This new challenge comes at a time when two other sonnet
controversies have reawakened. One is about whether or not
Shakespeare really wrote "A Lover's Complaint," the long lyric
poem appended to the 154 sonnets in the 1609 quarto edition. I
dealt with the "Complaint" argument in a previous column and
tend to agree with Brian Vickers and Jonathan Bate (who left the
poem out of the new Royal Shakespeare Company's edition of
The Complete Works of Shakespeare) that Shakespeare didn't
write the poem. But who wrote it, and why it was included in an
edition titled Shakespeare's Sonnets, remains a mystery. One that
Heylin, who agrees with Vickers that the "Complaint" was
written by an obscure hack named "John Davies," claims to have
solved. (Not all scholars have turned against the "Complaint."
Oxford's Katherine Duncan-Jones is a strong advocate for it
being "authorized" and includes it in her new Arden edition of
Shakespeare's poems.)
Another sonnet imbroglio showed up in the Aug. 15 edition of
the Times Literary Supplement in an essay by Bate, who believes
he has figured out who the sonnets were really dedicated to—a
solution to a puzzle created by ambiguity in the dedication of the
1609 edition, which reads (in part):
To. The. Onlie. Begetter. Of.
These. Insuing. Sonnets.
Mr. W. H. All. Happinesse.
And. That. Eternitie.
Promised. By.
Our. Ever-Living. Poet …
This is, of course, a rat's nest of ambiguities. What is an "onlie
begetter," who is Mr. W.H., and what did he "beget"? Is the
dedication from Shakespeare to a patron, who may or may not
appear in the poems? Or is it from the printer to a patron?
Bate believes he's found another candidate for the sonnets'
mysterious dedicatee "Master W.H." One longtime candidate for
"Master W.H." is William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke.
Relying on the fact that an earl is not addressed as "master"—the
address used for a lesser "gentleman"—Bate points us to a
previously unheralded "William Herbert," this one from Wales,
who is distantly related to the earl of that name but who is only a
gentleman and fits other characteristics of "Master W.H.,"
including potential contact with Shakespeare. Two W.H.s!
Which is the bootleg dedicatee? Bate's argument seems
convincing, but in the last line of his essay, he says something
true about most Shakespearean biographical controversies:
The instant someone says: Yes, it is plausible
that Master William Herbert of Glamorgan
might really have been the Master W.H. of the
dedication to the sonnets—that will be the
moment when the idea will cease to be of
interest.
And so Bate's conjecture might excite the biographically
inclined, but to those of us who feel that the meaning and
resonance of the language in the sonnets is the heart of the
matter, the "bootleg question," which Heylin raises, is more
important. I'd never met Heylin, but his massive, well-respected
biography, Dylan: Behind the Shades (Revisited) contains a
generous mention of my long-ago Dylan interview—the one in
which he defined his "thin wild mercury sound." I was intrigued
when I got an e-mail from Heylin saying he was coming to New
York and wanted to discuss not Dylan but Shakespeare. (He'd
read my book The Shakespeare Wars and wanted my opinion on
his sonnet theory.) Although I was a little leery, because there
are so many nutty books about the sonnets, I was looking
forward to talking to him since I admired his biography and I
was doing a brief Dylan book for Yale University Press. (As it
turns out, Heylin is publishing another massive Dylan opus as
well as his sonnet book. Next year, he's coming out with the first
of a two-volume study of some 600 Dylan songs, establishing
what he believes to be the order in which they were written—
although not necessarily recorded or performed—an absolute
prolegomena to any future study of Dylan's evolution as an
artist.)
In any event, I was curious about Heylin's take on the sonnets
and my curiosity grew greater over a lunch at the downtown
Cafe Spice as Heylin—a native Mancunian who got his degree
with a thesis on Irish revolutionary poetry and seemed wellversed in Shakespearean lore—began to outline his theory.
If his theory settles the authorization controversy—and I say "if"
since few Shakespearean controversies ever seem to be
resolved—we may finally be freed of the fictional love story
arcs so many want to impose on the sonnets. At lunch, Heylin
and I spoke of the number of women who thought certain Dylan
love songs were written especially for them, implying he'd told
them so. One wonders whether Shakespeare played that game,
too. More power to them, but we don't have to play along.
Last Sunday in the New York Times' Week in Review section,
A.O. Scott reminded us of the late, lamented David Foster
Wallace's complaint about biographical criticism of another
great artist, Jorge Luis Borges—whose stories, Wallace once
wrote, "so completely transcend their motive cause that the
biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way,
irrelevant." Yes!
bootlegged, that doesn't, of course, mean the order couldn't be
his. It just renders it conjectural.
When it comes to the sonnets, as my exegetical hero Stephen
Booth, editor of the Yale University Press' edition of the sonnets
put it: "William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual,
bisexual or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on
that matter."
Readers may recall I wrote two columns earlier this year about
Dmitri Nabokov, Vlad's son, and the decision he faced about
whether to publish his father's last unfinished work—even after
his father had, on his deathbed, asked his family to destroy it.
The work, known informally as The Original of Laura, exists
only on some hundred or so early-draft index cards, long held in
a Swiss safe-deposit box by Dmitri, who couldn't bring himself
to decide what to do.
In other words, the sonnets should be read as poems, not diary
entries. And to cram them into some crusty, procrustean
biographical bed is to read the life out of them by trying to read
the life into them.
Why is there doubt Shakespeare authorized the sonnets? It's
complicated. For one, the pamphlet's title is "Shakespeare's
Sonnets," rather than "Sonnets," by William Shakespeare.
There's the fact that the 1609 edition was never reprinted
(suggesting an intervention by the author). And then there's the
mystery of its dedicatee, the "onlie begetter." (Is the "onlie
begetter" a sly way of saying the one who begot them by
bootlegging them?)
I won't oversimplify Heylin's complex and apparently carefully
researched solution, which depends on several kinds of
evidence, but when he used the "bootleg" comparison his
inclination made sense. As editor of a leading Dylan fanzine, he
spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the burgeoning
bootleg culture of the '60s and '70s.
Bootlegging is, of course, a long artistic tradition. It's one
Shakespeare himself alludes to in The Winter's Tale, written
shortly after the 1609 sonnet book, in the character of the con
man Autolycus, who sells stolen ballads as his own: English lit's
first bootlegger.
For me, though the strongest evidence that the 1609 volume was
unauthorized is its inclusion of "A Lover's Complaint," which
just doesn't sound like Shakespeare to me. It sounds like a bad,
false bootleg. There's bad Shakespeare—I'm no bardolator—but
even bad Shakespeare is not this bad. The "Complaint" is
wretched. I can't imagine a Shakespeare who would want an
atrocious poem (see excerpts in my column on the subject) that
(I believe) he did not write to be attributed to him.
And if Shakespeare didn't want "Complaint" included, then the
edition must be unauthorized. He wouldn't have told a printer to
tack a hideous travesty of poetry onto a collection of his most
exquisitely wrought gems. But even if the 1609 edition was
Poor Shakespeare, his most exquisite lyric poems, the sonnets,
shackled for centuries to an atrocious fake. Oddly enough, in the
aftermath of my talk with Heylin, I began to think: Poor
Vladimir Nabokov.
Apparently the publicity generated by my Slate columns pressed
the Hamlet-like Dmitri to make a decision, and the manuscript of
Laura will be published about a year from now.
And while Dmitri has the legal right to publish Laura, he will
still be violating his father's injunction. Laura will be an even
more complex creature, a legal but unauthorized (by the author)
bootleg!
From the excerpts I have read, I can understand why V.N. might
have wanted them burned. He's getting into Lolita territory, at
least in one excerpt published by The Nabokovian. And then
there's the mystifying sentence fragment about "intercourse" that
The Nabokovian excerpt stopped just short of but that turned up
recently in the German newspaper Die Zeit. One could imagine
that if Nabokov was reworking that kind of material, he might
not have wanted a raw draft printed until he perfected it.
Particularly since it involved the most incendiary aspect of what
was his most incendiary work. He might well want an incendiary
early draft set on fire. I'm now thinking the manuscript of Laura
is the Nabokovian equivalent of "A Lover's Complaint," in the
sense that the prospect of its attachment to the finished, polished
canon of this perfectionist's art might well have been as
disturbing to him (even if it was his own early draft) as the bad,
fake Shakespeare of "A Lover's Complaint" would have been to
Shakespeare.
And then I came across something that Harvard's Helen
Vendler—coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, one of
the premiere interpreters of Shakespeare's sonnets—said about
the unauthorized publication of poems Elizabeth Bishop didn't
consider finished and didn't want published:
"If I had asked somebody to promise to destroy something of
mine," Vendler told Rachel Donadio of the New York Times,
"and they didn't do it I would feel it to be a grave personal
betrayal."
So here's a "Nabokov-lover's complaint" to Dmitri, inspired by
all this Dylan and Shakespeare authorized-and-unauthorized
cogitation: The New School is holding a symposium on the 50 th
anniversary of the publication of Lolita, and I'm on a panel about
Laura, and I've been thinking about what to say. Those who read
my Slate columns can see how conflicted I was then about
publishing Laura. I wanted Dmitri to make a decision, rather
than leaving it to lawyers after his death. But I wasn't sure what
his decision should be.
When he opted to publish (inspired, he's told us, by the ghostly
reappearance of his father who fortuitously urged Dmitri to cash
in on Laura), the decision was widely applauded. I'm sure I'll
read the book when it's published. But it seems to me that all too
many who considered the question seemed to dismiss the notion
that Nabokov's request should be respected, finding all sorts of
rationales. ("He should have burned it himself!") So many seem
to think that because of Nabokov's greatness he deserves less
respect, that he forfeited his right to have his last wishes carried
out to a "posterity" greedy for any and all half-digested scraps
from his table.
Why can't we respect his wish to erase a draft he didn't want to
see the light of day? For all we know, it might, in its unfinished
state, mislead us about Lolita and the rest of his canon.
It's probably too late, but I'm now thinking of calling for Dmitri
to change his mind and carry out his father's wishes. Don't
authorize a bootleg; burn it, Dmitri!
the undercover economist
Burn Her!
Why it's dangerous to be a witch in a recession.
By Tim Harford
Saturday, September 20, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET
Why did people murder suspected witches in Renaissance
Europe? And why do they still do so today in sub-Saharan
Africa? As someone whose main source of information about
witch trials is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I was fascinated
to learn that witch-burning has its own grim economics.
Clearly, some of the fervor for murdering women—typically
elderly widows—had cultural and religious origins. In the early
medieval period, the Catholic Church dismissed the idea that
witches had supernatural powers, and some church documents
argued that it was heresy to believe in witchcraft. Without
church support, it's easy to see why witch trials were not
popular.
Yet when the trial and execution of suspected witches surged in
the mid-16th century and throughout the 17th, it was a crosscultural phenomenon. Trials took place in many countries and
were conducted by both Protestants and Catholics, and in both
secular and religious courts. Perhaps a million women were
killed across Europe after being accused of witchcraft, and most
of them died during this period. Why?
Historian Wolfgang Behringer has one possible explanation:
Temperatures dropped sharply around the time that the trials
gained in popularity. The "little ice age," in which average
temperatures fell by about 1 degree Celsius, was enough to
freeze the Thames River on many occasions.
Emily Oster, an economist at the University of Chicago, has
tried to gather systematic data on the link between witch trials
and the weather. The results look striking: Between 1520 and
1770, colder decades go hand-in-hand with more trials. The link
may be simply that witches were often blamed for bad weather.
Or there may be a less direct link: People tend to lash out in
tough times. There is some evidence, for instance, that lynching
was more common in the American South when land prices and
cotton prices were depressed.
Such deaths are, sadly, not a historical footnote. In Meatu,
Tanzania, half of all reported murders are "witch killings." Such
murders have been documented elsewhere in Africa, Bolivia,
and rural India. The difference between the historical executions
and modern attacks are that a Tanzanian "witch" typically dies at
the hands of her own family. The machete is the weapon of
choice.
Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California,
Berkeley, and co-author of Economic Gangsters, a book about
the economics of crime, corruption, and war, has studied the
Tanzanian situation. He argues that there is a direct economic
motive for the attacks. Tough times in a Tanzanian household
may well result in starvation, and the elderly—especially
women—are at risk of being sacrificed to free resources. As
evidence, Miguel points out that victims of witch attacks in
Meatu district—almost all old women—tend to be from the
poorest households. The murders are much more common
during years of drought or flood.
If the problem truly is an economic one, the solution might be,
too. One possibility is to give the elderly generous pensions.
Witch killings all but stopped in South Africa's North Province
after such a pension scheme was introduced in the early 1990s.
Unfortunately, such pensions are probably too expensive for
Tanzania.
A grass-roots alternative has emerged in another Tanzanian
district, Ulanga, where traditional healers "cure" elderly women
of witchcraft by shaving their bodies and smearing their pates
with "anti-witchcraft paste." Miguel does not think it's a
coincidence that the healers also provide the women with food
and shelter during famines, in expectation of payments from
their families in better times. Spiritual ceremony meets social
insurance: It's a solution, of sorts.
today's business press
"This Sucker Could Go Down"
By Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
Friday, September 26, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET
today's papers
Things Fall Apart
By Daniel Politi
Friday, September 26, 2008, at 6:48 AM ET
A dizzying day of high-stakes Washington drama has left
everyone confused and unsure about whether the $700 billion
bailout to save the nation's financial system has any chance of
making it through Congress. Whereas yesterday's papers were
filled with optimism that a compromise would be reached, today
no one knows whether the breakdown in negotiations means the
plan is doomed or if it just represents a brief stumbling block.
The Los Angeles Times reports that, far from the limelight,
Republican and Democratic lawmakers were moving toward a
compromise, "but it remained to be seen whether there would be
enough votes to pass legislation." If that sounds familiar, it's
because that's how things looked yesterday in the early afternoon
when key lawmakers said they were well on their way to
agreeing on the "fundamentals" of a deal. But then in the White
House, a "verbal brawl" broke out in the Cabinet Room,
according to the New York Times, and things quickly fell apart,
which led to an eloquent declaration from President Bush: "If
money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down."
Bush's dire warnings weren't enough to save the plan after a
mixture of "financial concerns, presidential politics and partisan
rancor" resulted in "an unexpected Washington drama with the
nation's economic future hanging in the balance," says USA
Today. Who's to blame for the breakdown? The Washington
Post doesn't mince word and declares right off the bat that a
"renegade bloc of Republicans" managed to both surprise and
anger administration officials as well as congressional leaders
when they "moved to reshape" the bailout. The Wall Street
Journal reports that talks are set to resume this morning "without
House Republicans." Meanwhile, lawmakers received a crude
reminder of the fragility of the U.S. financial system last night as
federal regulators seized Washington Mutual and immediately
sold the bulk of its operations to J.P. Morgan Chase in what
amounted to the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
The NYT has the most complete details from inside the White
House meeting that was meant to display how members of both
parties could come together to solve a crisis. In the end, it
proved everything but. So, how did we get from deal to no deal
so quickly? Well, all that optimism quickly disappeared when
the House Republican leader, John Boehner, laid a bomb by
flatly declaring that rank-and-file members of his party were
unable to support the bailout plan. And he wasn't talking about
making an amendment or two—Boehner didn't like the idea of
the government buying distressed securities from troubled
financial companies. And as those following from home should
know by now, that's pretty much the entire basis behind the
administration's plan.
The WP reports that Obama and Rep. Barney Frank, one of the
key figures in the negotiations, began to question Boehner about
his new proposal, which would be a more market-based
approach and involve less government money. But Bush quickly
put a stop to that and summarily rejected this new plan that
would imply starting negotiations again from scratch. "Don't
start over," Bush said. John McCain, who the NYT reports was
mostly silent during the meeting while Barack Obama repeatedly
questioned Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, simply declined
to take a position on the issue.
The partisan rancor began flying as soon as the meeting broke
up. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson tried to lighten up the
mood by approaching a group of Democrats at the White House.
In a scene that everyone reports, Paulson dropped to one knee
and pleaded with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to "blow up"
the deal. "It's not me blowing this up, it's the Republicans,"
Pelosi said. "I know. I know," Paulson replied with a sigh.
Democrats didn't hide their anger and were quick to point the
finger at one man: McCain. "This is the presidential campaign of
John McCain undermining what Hank Paulson tells us is
essential for the country," Frank said. Indeed, the WSJ declares
that McCain's decision to return to Washington and participate in
the talks "appears to have complicated days of negotiations." For
its part, USAT flatly declares that "the good feelings" about an
imminent deal "seemed to evaporate" around the same time that
McCain joined the fray. Republicans, on the other hand, said
Democrats were the ones playing politics because they were
trying to quickly ram a deal down their throats early in the day to
prevent McCain from getting involved in the conversation.
In a Page One analysis, the NYT notes that "as a matter of
political appearances" the drama-filled day mostly just raised
more questions about exactly why McCain went to Washington
in the first place. And, as a bonus, those who wanted to know
what McCain thinks should be done to solve the impasse were
left scratching their heads. It's still too early to know how all this
will play out, but at the end of the day Obama was given an
opportunity to present himself "as the old hand at consensus
building, and as the real face of bipartisan politics." Obama said
the White House meeting showed that presidential politics
should not be brought into "delicate negotiations."
It's also not clear that McCain had much to do with the
alternative plan that House Republicans put forward yesterday.
The WP reports that while he was shuttling between meetings,
he "rarely came close to the Capitol suites and committee rooms
where the talks were taking place," and he was home by 6 p.m.
In an interesting nugget, the Post notes that aides described a
meeting between Boehner and McCain as "somewhat surreal,"
since neither one of them "was familiar with the details" of the
new proposal.
As for tonight's scheduled debate, no one knows whether it will
actually happen. Obama called on McCain to join him at the
University of Mississippi, but aides to the Republican nominee
insisted he's still committed to staying in Washington until a deal
is worked out on Capitol Hill. The NYT notes that at one point in
the day, McCain "dropped a hint that the ultimatum was not as
ironclad as he once said it was." If it does take place, everyone
predicts the audience for the debate would likely be huge,
"perhaps rivaling the record 80.6 million Americans" who
watched Ronald Reagan and President Carter face off in 1980,
says the LAT.
You know it's a big news day when the largest bank failure in
U.S. history gets relegated to second-tier status on the front
pages of the newspapers. After seizing Washington Mutual,
which was the country's largest savings-and-loan institution,
federal regulators immediately turned around and sold much of
the company to J.P. Morgan Chase for $1.9 billion in a deal that
will create the nation's largest bank in terms of deposits. WaMu
depositors have nothing to worry about because their cash will
be secure, even those with deposits larger than the federally
insured maximum. Shareholders, on the other hand, aren't likely
to see any money. The good news out of the "historic two-step,"
as the WP describes it, is that the federal insurance fund won't
have to dig into its own pockets to cover WaMu's deposits,
which totaled $188 billion in June.
WaMu's board was "kept completely in the dark" about the deal,
and its chief executive, Alan Fishman, was actually in midair
when the deal finally came through. Fishman shouldn't feel too
bad, though. He has been on the job for only 16 days and "is
eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep
his $7.5 million signing bonus," says the NYT.
And while the failure of WaMu might be the most visible sign of
the financial troubles facing the nation, it's hardly the only one.
The NYT reminds readers that even as some people wonder
whether the Bush administration is exaggerating the possibility
of an economic collapse, "the reality of tight credit already is
limiting daily economic activity." Many analysts continue to fear
that unless financial institutions find a way to get rid of their
toxic securities, they're likely to continue to "hoard their dollars
and starve the economy of capital," which could "pin the nation
in distress for years." And we won't have to wait long. The WSJ
ominously warns that "inside markets that are hidden to most
Americans ... action was unfolding that will soon affect how
companies meet payroll, pay vendors and make investments."
In other campaign news, the NYT takes a look at how Obama
isn't quite holding up his vow "to respond with the truth." While
McCain's misleading advertisements have received lots of
attention, Obama has also started to run television and radio ads
that "matched the dubious nature of Mr. McCain's more
questionable spots." Some Democrats are worried this tactic
could hurt Obama's image as someone who doesn't play politics
as usual. Others, however, say these ads are only fair considering
the misleading statements coming out of McCain's camp, and
these supporters insist that Obama's ads hardly come close in
terms of frivolousness and dishonesty to those of his opponent.
The papers report on two pieces of international news that are
unlikely to get much attention considering everything else going
on. First, everyone reports that Pakistani and U.S. ground troops
exchanged fire along the Afghanistan border yesterday. There
are differing accounts of what actually happened, but everyone
says it's stark reminder of the "risk of a much more serious, and
lethal, misunderstanding along the border," as the NYT puts it.
Meanwhile, the WP reports that a key reason why the deal to end
North Korea's nuclear weapons program has been unraveling
lately has to do with the "sweeping plan" presented by U.S.
officials to verify the claims it was making about its nuclear
programs. Others had warned the United States it was asking for
too much, and what once looked like promising talks quickly
came to a halt after the plan was presented.
The WP's Steven Pearlstein writes what TP thinks just might be
the most concise and easy-to-understand case in favor of the
bailout. Addressing those who are angry at the deal, he writes
that we have to make a choice between preventing a financial
collapse or teaching Wall Street a lesson, because "you can't do
both at the same time." Pearlstein even mentions an intriguing
idea of how to structure the rescue package "around a new
government-owned corporation" but does so to emphasize why
it's important to give the Treasury flexibility. "Just as we entrust
generals to fight a war, we are going to have to trust the
Treasury to find a way out of this crisis."
today's papers
Clear and Present Danger
By Daniel Politi
Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 6:42 AM ET
President Bush came out of hiding last night to warn the nation
that the economy is in crisis and the situation will get much
worse unless Congress acts quickly to pass the $700 billion
bailout of troubled financial institutions. "Our entire economy is
in danger," Bush said. The president took pains to emphasize
that the bailout wasn't designed to help Wall Street millionaires
but rather to preserve "America's overall economy." As USA
Today summarizes, Bush warned that "inaction could cause
millions of layoffs, bank failures, business closures, lost
retirement savings, more foreclosures, a further drying up of
credit and 'a long and painful recession.' " The Los Angeles
Times points out that the "wholehearted endorsement of massive
government intervention represents a startling about-face for a
president who has insisted throughout his career that such
meddling creates problems instead of fixing them."
In an effort to display the urgency of the situation, Bush invited
congressional leaders, along with the two parties' presidential
nominees, to what the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
and USAT all call an "extraordinary" meeting today at the White
House. The Washington Post points out that it was Bush's first
prime-time speech in more than a year, and the NYT notes that it
was the first time in his presidency that one was devoted entirely
to the economy.
Bush's prime-time address came after many Democrats on
Capitol Hill had been criticizing his silence as Republican
opposition to the bailout plan, particularly in the House,
appeared to grow in the last few days. Democrats "have argued
that they should not have to take the political risk of passing the
wildly unpopular measure without Republicans joining in," notes
the LAT. Key Democrats breathed a sigh of relief and predicted
that the speech would help gather support for the massive
bailout. The WSJ says that Democratic leaders hope to iron out
some of the major details of the plan this morning so they can
take a general outline to the White House meeting in the
afternoon when a final compromise might be cobbled together.
While all the papers warn that everything is still very much up in
the air, details of the compromises in the plan appear to be
taking shape, and the WSJ does the best job in clearly outlining
where things stand. In an unsurprising development, Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson appeared to drop his resistance to
limiting the pay of executives at companies that would
participate in the bailout. Now it seems almost certain that such
a measure would be included in the bailout package. In addition,
beefed-up oversight through the Government Accountability
Office also appears to be a shoo-in. And in another unsurprising
move, it seems Democrats are ready to stop pushing for a
measure that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms
of mortgages.
Whether the government would have the right to acquire shares
in the companies it bails out appears to be less clear. The NYT
cites Democrats saying that the White House has agreed to such
a measure that would theoretically allow taxpayers to profit from
the bailout if the companies recover. For its part, the WSJ
cryptically says that "in certain cases" the government could get
the right to an equity stake but doesn't spell out what these cases
would be. Of course, it's more than likely that the lawmakers
themselves don't know yet.
Most interesting of all is an idea that was barely talked about a
few days ago but seems to have gathered steam in Democratic
circles yesterday as more lawmakers wondered whether they
couldn't effectively set up an installment plan. Under this
scenario, the Democrats would authorize the entire $700 billion
but disburse only a smaller amount—$150 billion, according to
the NYT—to get the program started. The WSJ reports that some
Democrats want to "establish benchmarks" to periodically assess
whether to give out the next batch of billions. The White House
isn't too keen on the idea but appears to be open to it as long as
getting each installment won't require congressional approval.
Despite all the wheeling and dealing, the WSJ warns that "it's
impossible to handicap the bill's actual prospects." This is
particularly true due to the continued opposition from many
House Republicans, who the Post says "have emerged as the
most difficult bloc of votes." But don't fear, John McCain is
coming to the rescue.
All the papers give big front-page play to what the LAT calls "a
dizzying day of political one-upmanship" that culminated with
both candidates agreeing to go back to Washington to participate
in the bailout negotiations. It all began when Barack Obama
placed a call to McCain yesterday morning to discuss issuing a
joint statement of principles on the bailout plan. Instead of
giving into the ploy, McCain decided to "up the ante" and
announced that he was throwing his campaign schedule aside to
return to Washington. Obama at first hesitated when McCain
called for him to return to Capitol Hill, saying that it would
merely bring "presidential politics" into vital negotiations. But
after Bush "did exactly as McCain had requested" (WP) in
calling for the White House meeting, Obama had no choice but
to give in.
McCain called on Obama to postpone the Friday-night debate
and join him in pulling down ads and stop all fundraising until a
deal is reached. Obama quickly rejected the idea of postponing
the debate as Democrats trampled over one another trying to be
the first to call McCain's move a transparent political maneuver.
"Statesmanship or gamesmanship?" asks USAT in a question that
is echoed throughout all the papers. Whatever the case may be,
it's clear that McCain has, yet again, managed to shake up the
presidential race at a time when several polls have been showing
Obama gaining ground.
The LAT fronts a new poll that illustrates how registered voters
prefer Obama's ideas on the economy to McCain's by a wide
margin. But unlike yesterday's WP poll, the LAT says the race
remains neck-and-neck nationally as Obama only has a fourpercentage-point lead over McCain among likely voters and a
two-percentage-point lead among all registered voters.
today's papers
The WSJ notes that like so many decisions he has taken in the
past, McCain's move "was both high risk and high reward."
Slate's John Dickerson calls it McCain's "second Hail Mary pass
in a month." The WP's Dan Balz says the latest McCain gamble
"may be among the biggest of his political life." At a time when
Democrats have the most to gain from troubles in the economy,
McCain has successfully put the focus back on himself as he
seeks to display strong leadership in a time of crisis. As a bonus,
he also essentially tried to make it seem as if Obama was merely
following his lead on the biggest issues of the day. But the move
could easily backfire if voters see it as an attempt to exploit a
very real crisis for political gain.
As for the debate, no one knows whether it'll actually take place
now. The Commission on Presidential Debates said it is moving
forward with Friday night's encounter in Oxford, Miss., but
McCain said he would attend only if lawmakers reach an
agreement on the bailout package before then. Obama says he
plans to be there, and the NYT hears word that the commission
wants to try to pressure McCain to reconsider by releasing a
statement insisting that the debate go on as scheduled. Even
some Republicans questioned the wisdom of McCain's move,
particularly since the debate was to focus on foreign policy,
which many see as McCain's strength.
Whatever the ultimate verdict from voters may be, McCain's
move has also added "an unpredictable new element into the
negotiations for the bailout," says the NYT. Democratic
lawmakers were quick to criticize the move, saying that the
involvement of presidential candidates would complicate the
negotiations. "We need leadership, not a campaign photo op,"
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. For their part,
Republican lawmakers welcomed McCain and touted his actions
as a bold move from a strong leader. Still, as the LAT notes,
McCain "faces an uncertain reception from Capitol Hill
Republicans" since many rank-and-file lawmakers have spoken
up against the plan. It could potentially be embarrassing for
McCain if for some reason he doesn't manage to bring
Republicans in line to support the bailout.
Looking Back in Anger
By Daniel Politi
Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 6:19 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and USA Today lead
with the continuing bailout politics as the Bush administration
sent some of its top officials to Capitol Hill yesterday in an
effort to convince lawmakers they need to pass the $700 billion
plan as soon as possible. Instead of falling in line as many had
expected, congressional opposition to the bailout seems to be
growing every day. The men of the hour, Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson,
appeared before the Senate banking committee to push
lawmakers toward action. In what USAT calls perhaps his
"darkest economic assessment" since becoming chairman,
Bernanke warned that the current crisis is unlike anything the
country has ever seen, and failing to approve the bailout would
have "significant adverse consequences for the average person."
Despite these dire predictions, congressional opposition,
particularly from Republicans in the House, was so strong that
by last night "it was no longer certain that a version of the
Paulson-Bernanke plan could win passage," the LAT declares.
The Wall Street Journal banners, and the NYT off-leads, news
that Warren Buffett will invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs. The
WSJ calls the cash infusion by the famous investor "one of the
biggest expressions of confidence in the financial system since
the credit crisis intensified early this month." Financial stocks,
including Goldman's, surged in after-hours trading as Buffett's
decision "immediately heartened investors," says the NYT. The
Washington Post leads with a new presidential election poll that
suggests the economic turmoil is helping Barack Obama, who
now has the first clear lead in the general-election campaign.
Among likely voters, Obama leads John McCain by 52 percent
to 43 percent. A mere 9 percent rated the economy as good or
excellent, and 50 percent cited it as the most important issue.
That undoubtedly helps Obama, who has a sizable advantage as
the candidate best-suited to handle the current financial crisis.
The WP highlights that the back-and-forth on the campaign trail
once again gave voters a front-seat view into the differences in
the candidates' styles of leadership. While McCain showed a
willingness to "act boldly, if impulsively, to inject himself into
the middle of delicate negotiations to force a solution" Obama
adopted "a cooler approach designed to show calm in the midst
of crisis," notes the WP.
Vice President Dick Cheney was dispatched along with a few
top White House officials yesterday morning to meet with House
Republicans and try to convince them to approve the bailout
plan as quickly as possible. But the closed-door session appeared
to do little to convince lawmakers that the economy is doomed if
a bailout doesn't pass. "Just because God created the world in
seven days doesn't mean we have to pass this bill in seven days,"
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said after the meeting.
"This election is turning into a Goldilocks story," writes the
NYT's Gail Collins. "One candidate's too hot, and one's too
cool."
The LAT reports that Democratic leaders in Congress "admitted
privately that they had been thrown off course by the vehemence
of the opposition." Democrats warned they would not move
forward with such a massive plan unless they had significant
Republican support. As the NYT points out, Democrats are now
particularly worried that a lack of support from GOP lawmakers
"could leave them in an undesired alliance with the Bush
administration." None of the papers spells it out, but it seems
clear that Democrats are worried this is part of a Republican
strategy to distance themselves from the bailout to then turn
around and use its passage against Democrats in the upcoming
elections.
Despite all the huffing and puffing, the LAT wonders whether
Congress would really "dare to kill or seriously delay the only
plan on the table—and, if it did, would an economic debacle
ensue?" Paulson and Bernanke were emphatic yesterday that the
plan is vital to the economy's survival even as they insisted that
they weren't happy about having to ask for this kind of authority
from Congress. "I share the outrage that people have. I think this
is embarrassing," Paulson told the Senate banking committee.
Senators met the two men "with a nearly universal tone of
disgust," says the Post, and they characterized the bailout as a
golden parachute for the companies that got us into this financial
mess in the first place. At times it seemed like there was a
competition going on to see who cared most about the average
taxpayer, and Paulson and Bernanke played along, insisting the
bailout plan is designed to help (you guessed it) the taxpayer, not
Wall Street fat cats.
For now, the angry lawmakers aren't saying they'll vote against
the bailout but rather are concentrating on key changes they
want to insert in the legislation. The one that now seems
inevitable is the limit on executive compensation for the firms
that participate in the bailout because the presidential candidates,
as well as key lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, have
expressed support for the measure.
Democrats are also pushing hard to give taxpayers an equity
stake in the participating companies. But Paulson and Bernanke
were adamant that they would oppose the changes because, as
the LAT helpfully explains, the goal of the plan is to help
markets regain the ability to set prices for their toxic assets, and
if only the most desperate companies participate, then the market
won't believe the resulting sale prices, thus making the whole
thing a pointless exercise. This is why Bernanke also said the
government should pay a reasonable price rather than the
cheapest price possible for the troubled securities.
Paulson will speak to House Republicans this morning, and he
and Bernanke will face the House financial services committee,
which, as the NYT points out, "could prove even more hostile
than the Senate banking panel."
One of the likely reasons for all the grandstanding in Capitol Hill
is that lawmakers know voters are watching. The WP's poll
reveals that 52 percent of people believe the economy is in a
serious long-term decline while around 80 percent say they are
concerned about the direction of the economy. The majority of
white voters who say they are concerned with the economy's
direction support Obama. The new poll also shows that Obama
has a 21-point lead with independent voters, which is a marked
change from the small lead McCain enjoyed after the Republican
Convention.
The LAT also has a poll that generally confirms the WP's finding
that voters think Obama would do a better job handling the
financial crisis than McCain. A "solid majority" of the 50
percent of Americans who said they feel less financially secure
now than they did six months ago favor putting Obama in the
White House. The LAT also reports that 55 percent of
respondents said the government shouldn't be planning a bailout,
although that figure probably has more to do with the way the
question was asked—whether it's "the government's
responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayers'
dollars"—and it's unclear whether Americans understand how
the rescue package would work.
In other campaign news, the NYT fronts and the WP goes inside
with word that a lobbying firm co-owned by Rick Davis,
McCain's campaign manager, received payments from mortgage
giant Freddie Mac until last month. Freddie Mac apparently paid
the company approximately $15,000 a month starting at the end
of 2005. And that's on top of the $2 million Davis received from
both mortgage giants from 2000 to 2005. Why does this matter?
Well, it doesn't really, except that McCain has spent lots of time
lately attacking Obama for his supposed ties to chief executives
of the mortgage giants. On Sunday, the Republican nominee said
Davis had no involvement with Freddie Mac for the last several
years. But hey, it might have been easy for Davis to forget
because, according to the NYT's sources, Davis didn't do much
work for his $15,000-a-month paycheck as his company was
apparently kept on the payroll simply because of its ties to
McCain. Davis took a leave from the company for the campaign
but continues to have a financial stake in its success.
In an interesting Page One piece, the WP points out that while
Paulson and Bernanke insist the massive bailout is the only way
to save the economy from Armageddon, other experts disagree
and say there are several other ways the government could get
involved without risking so much taxpayer money. The
government could, for example, simply lend money to troubled
banks or concentrate on preventing foreclosures. Alternatively,
some think the government could stimulate Wall Street by
repealing the capital gains tax for two years.
The NYT's David Leonhardt writes that members of Congress are
taking their eyes off the ball. Instead of simply focusing on how
to solve the crisis while limiting taxpayer cost, many are
choosing to focus on "sideshows." And while that's hardly a
novelty in Congress, the fragile state of the markets means
"there's no time to waste." Even though the efforts to cut
executive pay and change bankruptcy laws "are based on a
worthy instinct," the best way to deal with the larger problems in
the economy "is to make sure the government spends as little
[as] possible on an effective bailout."
The WP's Steven Pearlstein notes that while much has been said
in the past few days about how to rescue the financial system, no
one has uttered two crucial words: "We're sorry." These two
words "have been conspicuously absent" from the debate, and
they're precisely what Americans need to hear. "Until Wall
Street can muster the decency, the humility and the good sense
to acknowledge its colossal screw-up," writes Pearlstein, "it
shouldn't be surprising that Americans are balking at writing the
check."
today's papers
Bail Me Out Tonight
By Daniel Politi
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at 6:30 AM ET
The Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times
lead with news that the Bush administration and congressional
leaders are moving closer to agreeing on the $700 billion bailout
plan for financial firms. The LAT says that in its rush to pass the
plan, the Bush administration is agreeing to measures that
"would have been inconceivable even a few weeks ago." But
deep skepticism remains on both sides of the aisle, and suddenly
lawmakers aren't being shy about questioning whether the plan
would really succeed in shoring up the nation's ailing financial
system. The WP points out that some lawmakers are now saying
it might be unrealistic for them to pass a plan by Friday. And as
doubts increased in Capitol Hill, investors responded in kind and
continued to send the markets on the dizzying rollercoaster ride
that has been all too familiar lately. The Dow Jones industrial
average tumbled 372 points, or 3.3 percent, which more than
erased Friday's huge gains. "It marked the first time in the Dow's
history that it has moved more than 350 points, four days in a
row," notes the Wall Street Journal in a Page One piece.
The WSJ's world-wide newsbox leads with a look at the
presidential candidates' assessments of the bailout plan. Neither
candidate said how he would vote if the bailout reaches the
Senate floor, though they agreed on several key aspects they
want to see changed. Barack Obama and John McCain both want
to put limits on executive pay as well as increase oversight of the
Treasury while also demanding greater transparency of how the
money is spent. USA Today leads with word that the Department
of Veteran Affairs will publish new regulations today that will
"substantially increase" the disability benefits for veterans with
mild traumatic brain injuries. The move marks the first time the
government has officially acknowledged that even those with
mild symptoms can struggle to make a living when they get back
home. These veterans could receive $600 a month, whereas they
now collect a mere $117. The department expects somewhere
between 3,500 and 5,000 veterans to benefit from the new
regulation.
The White House was busy ratcheting up the pressure on
lawmakers to pass the bailout plan quickly, warning that failing
to do so could have dire consequences. The WP notes that the
scene is "reminiscent" of the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, when lawmakers were under deep pressure to act
quickly. Still, lawmakers were adamant that they wouldn't let the
administration railroad them into anything even as they kept on
insisting that they're working against the clock to come up with a
plan that everyone can agree on, although it seems clear that in
order to pass many will have to accept less-than-ideal measures.
The LAT points out that the key negotiations are now taking
place between Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Rep.
Barney Frank, chairman of the House financial services
committee. Although any plan must also pass the Senate, the
administration is betting that if it can get the House to go along
then the Senate will be forced to follow suit.
So, if everyone agrees that a bailout will ultimately be approved,
what's the holdup? It would be easy to say that the devil is in the
details, but the disagreements go far beyond a few footnotes or
commas. In broad terms, it seems the Treasury has agreed to
demands that an independent oversight board be created to keep
tabs on how the bailout is handled. Everyone also points out that
the administration appears to have agreed to a Democratic
demand that the government assist homeowners at risk of
foreclosure. But key disagreements remain, including on a
proposal to limit executive compensation at companies
participating in the bailout as well as a provision that would
make it easier for bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages for
homeowners who are at risk of losing their homes.
The NYT says that the administration officials and lawmakers are
close to an agreement on whether taxpayers would be simply
buying up the toxic securities or whether the government would
also get the right to buy stock in the companies it helps dig out
of a financial hole. But everyone else says that's still a key
sticking point because Treasury officials fear it would limit those
willing to participate in the program since only banks that are
sure to fail would be willing to give the government stock.
Democrats insist the point is critical so taxpayers could benefit if
the companies' stock prices increase. "If this is an investment,
the taxpayer should not be treated as dumb money," Rep. Rahm
Emanuel said.
It would be a mistake to think of these disagreements as a
merely Republican vs. Democratic issue as some of the harshest
criticism of the bailout came from Republicans. "I am concerned
that Treasury's proposal is neither workable nor comprehensive
despite its enormous price tag," Sen. Richard Shelby of
Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, said.
"It would be foolish to waste massive sums of taxpayer funds
testing an idea that has been hastily crafted." Newt Gingrich
predicted that as time goes on more Republicans will be
speaking up against a plan that goes against all the free-market
rhetoric many have been espousing for years. "I think this is
going to be a much bigger fight than [Bush] expected," Gingrich
said.
While skepticism grew on Capitol Hill, investors also began to
think twice. After two days of market gains when investors
seemed to treat the government bailout as a panacea, they
suddenly began to worry that perhaps it won't be a cure-all and,
in fact, could make things worse by increasing the deficit. There
was perhaps no clearer sign of these worries than in the currency
markets, where, as the WSJ points out, "the dollar posted its
worst single-day percentage drop against the euro, 2.5%, since
the European currency's inception nine years ago."
Along with that plunge in the U.S. currency came a huge
increase in the price of oil that the WP says saw "its biggest oneday jump ever in dollar terms." In a Page One analysis, the WP
says the drop in the currency markets is a clear sign that
investors around the world are worried the U.S. economy is
nowhere near rock bottom. "Growth is going to be slower, the
budget deficit higher, but mostly, the whole U.S. financial
system has been thrown into question," one analyst said.
Meanwhile the massive bailout is raising questions about how
much debt the United States can take on without raising taxes or
cutting spending. Some analysts say that by not outlining how
the bailout will be financed, many are assuming the government
thinks the solution is just to print more money and deal with
inflation later. "[I]f you think inflation is the answer, take a trip
to Zimbabwe and see how it's working for them," one analyst
tells the Post.
Then there's also the not-inconsequential question of how much
the government will pay for the toxic mortgage securities held
by banks. As the WP points out inside, government officials will
have to answer "the same question that has vexed the brightest
minds on Wall Street for more than a year: What are the darn
things worth?" The key is no one knows, and many are worried
the government will end up paying way too much for them.
Then again, paying too much for them is exactly what the banks
need in order to return to their normal operations. It's a "tricky
balancing act" that some think will simply end up demonstrating
that banks need much more capital than many thought.
In its own front-page analysis, the NYT notes that while most
agree some form of bailout is needed, many are growing deeply
skeptical about the demands from the administration that the
plan has to be approved right now or we risk falling into another
Great Depression. While some are indeed worried that the
government will end up paying too much, ultimately many are
uncomfortable with the fact that the bailout "is being sold as a
must-have emergency measure by an administration with a
controversial record when it comes to asking Congress for
special authority in time of duress." There are also those who
question the wisdom of giving so much power to Paulson, "a guy
who totally missed this, and has been wrong about almost
everything," as one analyst put it.
In a scathing piece, the NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin says that
Paulson is asking for "the financial equivalent of the Patriot Act"
that would give the Treasury secretary "perhaps the most
incredible powers ever bestowed on one person over the
economic and financial life of the nation." The bailout would not
only be the biggest rescue as has often been repeated, it would
also amount to "the most amazing power grab in the history of
the American economy." And in the it-would-be-funny-if-itweren't-so-troubling department, Sorkin points out that last week
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had some choice words for
his friends up north: "They have criticized me, especially in the
United States, for nationalizing a great company, CANTV, that
didn't even cost $1.5 billion."
It may be the end of the financial world as we know it, but the
presidential candidates feel fine. The Post points out that while
lawmakers are busy approving a plan that could take the federal
deficit toward the trillion-dollar mark, neither candidate really
thinks that's reason enough to change his economic plans. The
financial system is collapsing all around us, but the candidates
are choosing to focus on such deadly important issues—such as
who has bigger lobbying ties to Fannie Mae and whose advisers
got the biggest "golden parachute"—that many economists can't
help but be baffled and look at the campaign as a mere
"sideshow" to the real news of the day, says the Post.
The candidates' reluctance to take on the biggest issue of the day
might be understandable, though, because sometimes when they
try they just make things worse for themselves. In the WP's oped page, George Will writes that McCain "is behaving like a
flustered rookie playing in a league too high." The conservative
columnist says that McCain's "childish reflex" to insist that the
chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission "betrayed
the public trust" and should be axed "is a harbinger of a McCain
presidency." Will even goes as far as to wonder whether
conservatives can really trust McCain to make good judicial
selections because of his "impulsive, intensely personal reactions
to people and events." While Obama might not be ready to sit in
the Oval Office because of his inexperience, it "is arguable that
McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless
reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency."
today's papers
Wall Street at a Crossroads
Jesse Stanchak
Monday, September 22, 2008, at 6:34 AM ET
After a whirlwind weekend of negotiations, the political
dimensions of the Treasury Department's $700 billion mortgage
bailout proposal are starting to take shape, even as the financial
sector continues to shift dramatically. The New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today each
lead with their latest analysis of how the Treasury Department's
proposal will wind its way through Congress. The Wall Street
Journal leads with the end of the era of investment banking, as
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs opt to become holding
companies.
Now that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson has presented
members of Congress with an outline of his plan, Congress is
weighing in with a few ideas of its own. While support for the
concept of the buyout seems solid at the moment, the papers all
say that Democrats and Republicans each have concerns they
want addressed. The NYT focuses on high-ranking Democrats'
desire to see greater industry regulation attached to the bill, up to
and including regulating the salaries of executives whose
companies participate in the buyout. Other concerns include
increasing the programs' oversight requirements and perhaps
including some sort of assistance for troubled homeowners. The
WSJ says that the argument for housing aid adds a bitter twist to
the debate, since "taxpayers are now both creditors and debtors
in the housing mess." The LAT suggests the buyout may help
homebuyers indirectly, even without any special aid for
consumers.
Financial institutions are lobbying members of Congress at full
tilt, reports the NYT. Some are pushing for an expanded bailout
package that would go beyond just mortgages and allow the
government to buy up "any financial instrument." The paper also
says that several companies are especially interested in who will
manage the government's new acquisitions, a contract that could
easily be worth billions annually.
The NYT notes that the Asian markets' reaction to the weekend's
developments was cautiously positive in early trading.
The WP fronts a man-on-the-street piece about local taxpayer
resentment of the buyout plan.
The NYT goes inside with a piece on how the power of the
treasury secretary has grown over the last two years. The paper
goes on to speculate about who will take over from Paulson after
the next president takes office.
USAT off-leads with Pakistan saying it has declined the FBI's
help in investigating the hotel bombing in Islamabad. The attack
killed 53 people, including two Americans. Inside, the NYT
examines the political implications of the attack.
Virginia's 13 electoral votes are in play for the first time in more
than 40 years, a phenomenon that's made life easier for
fundraisers from both parties. Virginians gave $25.3 million
during the current election cycle, says the WP, up from $14.2
million during the 2004 campaign. Contributions to Democratic
presidential candidates led donations to Republicans by about 5to-3, with about 85 percent of all donations coming from
Northern Virginia donors.
House Republicans, meanwhile, want assurances that any profits
made from the eventual sale of these distressed assets will be
used to pay down the national debt, says the WP. Some
Republicans continue to voice concern over the scope and cost
of the package, but the papers all agree that the chances of
anyone stalling the measure are slim. Paulson is quoted in all the
papers asking Congress to pass his proposal without significant
changes and saying he still hopes Congress will pass the bill
before leaving for a recess on Friday.
Of course, voting in Virginia has already begun for some people,
according to USAT. Virginia is one of 34 states that have some
type of early-voting program. The paper claims that more people
will vote early this year than ever before, with one expert
predicting that nearly one-third of the electorate will vote before
Nov. 4.
The WSJ explains that the conversion of the last two investment
banks to commercial banking is meant to stabilize the financial
titans and keep them from going the way of Lehman Bros.
Becoming retail banks will mean that Morgan Stanley and
Goldman Sachs will be able to use bank deposits as a cushion
for their investments. In exchange, they will now face greater
regulation, stricter debt limits, and, in all likelihood, lower
profitability than they've seen in the past. The NYT calls the
move "a blunt acknowledgment that their model of finance and
investing had become too risky."
The NYT fronts (and USAT teases) a farewell to Yankee
Stadium.
The LAT fronts coverage of last night's Emmy Awards, in which
Mad Men and 30 Rock won the top prizes.
today's papers
$700,000,000,000
By David Sessions
Sunday, September 21, 2008, at 5:12 AM ET
The Sunday editions of the Washington Post, New York Times,
and Los Angeles Times all lead with the latest details on the
Bush administration's plan to rescue the crippled U.S.
economy—most of all yesterday's increase of the price to $700
billion, a figure higher than the current cost of the Iraq war. (The
LAT conveys the magnitude of the number by sprawling all 11
zeros across its front page.) Bush's plan would also give the
Treasury Department "unfettered authority" to buy failing
properties, notes the NYT's lede, and raise the legal limit for U.S.
national debt to a staggering $11.3 trillion. All three papers also
front yesterday's deadly hotel bombing in Pakistan, one of the
most catastrophic terrorist attacks in the nation's history.
Speaking Saturday about his bailout plan, President Bush said,
"The risk of doing nothing far outweighs the risk of the package"
and that, over time, we're going to get a lot of the money back.
The WP reports that the proposal puts no time limit on how long
the government may hold the assets it purchases but that the goal
is "to sell them after housing prices recover and to earn back
much of the money."
While just about everyone agrees that a basic bailout for Wall
Street is necessary, there is potential conflict afoot: Democrats
plan to insist on provisions to "help hundreds of thousands of
troubled borrowers at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure,"
the NYT reports. "Democrats worry that it will primarily be
viewed as a bailout for big Wall Street firms," the WP explains.
(House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi is quoted by the NYT
saying the government should "insulate Main Street from Wall
Street.") Both papers mention congressional Republicans'
warnings that the extra spending measures will slow the
proposal's passage.
Forty people were killed and 250 were injured in Islamabad,
Pakistan, when an explosives-packed truck rammed into the
gates of the five-star Marriott, where foreign diplomats often
stay. Similar attacks have been previously attempted on the
hotel, which is near both Pakistan's house of parliament and the
residence of its prime minister. The precise hour chosen for this
attempt—after sunset during Ramadan—was plainly strategic,
the LAT notes, since it was a time when the hotel was certain to
be overflowing with guests. No militant groups have yet claimed
responsibility for the bombing, but the LAT observes that "the
size of the truck bomb, the successful strike against a wellguarded target and the apparently careful planning were all signs
of a skilled and experienced militant group."
with populist politician Jacob Zuma led to the vote—a court
cleared Zuma of corruption charges last week and suggested that
Mbeki had plotted to have him prosecuted, an accusation that
inflamed party divisions. The WP describes Zuma as "a populist
who is considered likely to win the presidency next year." The
NYT credits the outgoing president, who succeeded Nelson
Mandela, with "[leading] the nation to an unprecedented run of
economic growth" but notes that his administration floated
dubious theories about AIDS infection and was unable to resolve
South Africa's deep divide between the rich and poor.
The LAT fronts grumbling in Alaska over the McCain-Palin
campaign's seeming siege of the governor's office in Juneau,
which now diverts all calls and requests to campaign
headquarters in Virginia. The editorial page of the Anchorage
Daily News demanded yesterday that Sarah Palin "speak for
herself, directly to Alaskans, about her actions as Alaska's
governor." The campaign's information lockdown has touched a
"raw nerve" with the state's "fiercely independent" populace,
which has more criticism for Palin now than before her
nomination as the Republican candidate for vice president. The
complaining Alaskans on record for the story range from
Democratic legislators to conservative talk-radio hosts.
A story in the NYT's "A" section links a same-sex marriage ban
to appear on California's November ballot to the expected high
turnout among black voters mobilized to vote for Barack
Obama. Gay rights groups worry that African-American voters,
who generally lean conservative on social issues, will provide
extra support for the ban when they turn out to vote for Obama.
To counter that possible side effect, they are courting black
pastors and churches with this message: "Gay people are black
and black people are gay," as one leader told the Times.
A whimsical essay in the WP "Style" section marks the passing
of the "everybody" era of pop culture, which has given way to
the "nobody" era. ("Nobody watches television on an actual
television. Nobody watches actual broadcasts in real time,
because nobody sits through ads. Nobody watches entire TV
shows, just the best clips. Nobody watches prime time.") But we
may be less fragmented than we think—after all, "everybody" is
telling us the ways "nobody" does it anymore.
today's papers
In a separate story deeper in the paper, the NYT reports the first
speech from freshly sworn-in Pakistani president Asif Ali
Zardari, who called for an end to both terrorism and U.S.
missions to counter terrorism within Pakistan.
Mortgaging the Future
The NYT and WP front (and the LAT also reports) the resignation
of South African President Thabo Mbeki, whose party voted to
recall him before the conclusion of his final term. A bitter rivalry
The Bush administration announced Friday that it would seek to
stabilize the financial sector by buying up the distressed
mortgages that were at the heart of last week's market calamities.
By Jesse Stanchak
Saturday, September 20, 2008, at 7:11 AM ET
All the papers lead with their analysis of the plan, although
details are still scant and questions abound. Treasury Secretary
Henry Paulson had yet to formally present a formal proposal by
the time the papers were put to bed, but he had briefed
lawmakers on his plan via conference call.
According to the New York Times, the plan's goal is to restore
stability by soaking up assets that aren't easily turned into cash,
increasing the availability of capital. The Washington Post says
the government will also look to insure money-market mutual
funds, which currently comprise $3.5 trillion in investments, in
order to maintain a ready supply of short-term funding for
corporations. This aspect of the plan displeases bankers, who
fear that insuring these funds will destabilize banks by luring
away customers from savings accounts. The Los Angeles Times,
however, reports that any money market insurance plan would
most likely last for one year only.
The biggest question is what this plan, potentially the biggest
government intervention in the market since the Great
Depression, will cost. The WP says $500 billion. The NYT says
possibly as much as $1 trillion. The LAT thinks the price tag
could reach $2 trillion. That money wouldn't all be spent at once.
It's unclear how many mortgages would be bought up and how
quickly. The Wall Street Journal says the government would
most likely use a reverse auction model, buying up cheaper
properties first and so giving banks an incentive to offer them a
deal. The paper worries, however, that if the government
negotiates too aggressively it will only hurt banks further.
Stocks surged in anticipation of the plan on Friday, with the
Dow Jones industrial average posting its "biggest back-to-back
point gains in more than eight years," according to the LAT.
Fridays' bump all but erased the losses sustained earlier in the
week. Never the less, the NYT reports that investors are unhappy
about new restrictions imposed in the wake of last week's chaos.
To different degrees, the papers all suggest that the biggest
hurdle the plan will face is getting past Congress. Both Secretary
Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke have
been leaning toward large-scale intervention for some time,
according to the WP, but they didn't want to propose a plan only
to have Congress reject it, spurring further panic in the market.
But by Wednesday, says the WSJ, the two men felt they had no
choice. Now they must hope that the urgency of last week's
events will give their proposal the momentum it needs to quickly
clear Congress.
Still, as the NYT notes, the two parties are in no mood to
cooperate six weeks before an election. Both sides also have
plenty of misgivings about the proposal. Democrats worry it will
only help wealthy financiers, and Republicans are concerned by
the plan's price tag. Timing is also an issue: Lawmakers were
planning on adjourning next Friday and staying in recess until
after the November elections. Before they go, they'll face several
other high-profile bills, including a resolution to continue
funding the government past Oct. 1.
The WP uses the mortgage buyout as a news peg for its offlead
analysis of President Bush's second term. The paper argues that
the plan, which some Republicans say violates the tenets of
small-government conservatism, is just the latest in a string of
signs that Bush has become less ideologically rigid in his second
term.
The LAT decides to use the current financial mess as a test of the
leadership styles of Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. The
paper concludes that their responses closely mirror their
campaign styles, with McCain looking to attack the problem
head on and Obama deferring in hopes of building consensus.
The NYT gives Sen. Joe Biden a glowing review for his
performance on the campaign trail last week but says his efforts
are generating little notice. The paper says the Obama camp is
now trying to reintroduce its VP pick to the nation after Sarah
Palin grabbed the spotlight during the week of the Republican
National Convention.
Meanwhile, inside the WP declares that Palin and McCain have
created a "new way of campaigning" by touring the country
together, instead of splitting up to cover more ground as most
running mates do. Unfortunately, the paper doesn't do much to
explain why the McCain camp has chosen to campaign this way.
The paper says that women like Palin and that she draws a
crowd, but she would do the same if she were touring alone. Is
touring together more effective? If so, why do Obama and Biden
travel separately? What is it about the McCain-Palin ticket that
makes this arrangement preferable? The piece does say,
"McCain likes having Palin along," but TP would hope there's
more to the story than that.
The WP fronts coverage of a high-class fundraiser for secondhand retailer Goodwill. The story quickly turns into a look at
how sales at thrifts shops have surged across the nation this year.
The articles suggest that in hard times, even the well-to-do enjoy
a bargain, and a growing recognition that second hand stores
sometimes contain hidden treasures has only fueled the chain's
popularity.
well-traveled
The Mongolia Obsession
Bones are all that is left of the Mongolian empire.
By Tim Wu
Friday, September 26, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
From: Tim Wu
Subject: Getting Started in Mongolia
Updated Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 7:17 AM ET
I had wanted to go to Mongolia for years. When you travel
around the world, you rarely meet Mongolians, but you're
always running into things they did. In the Middle East, it's a
massacre here, a ruined fortress there, and now and then a few
captured swords and bows. In Beijing, a giant stupa covered in
Mongolian writing. In Northern India, all the really great
buildings, including the Taj Mahal, were built by the Mughals,
who were descended from the Mongolians. So, what is this
place, this Mongolia? Who lives there? And where did they all
go?
It was time to get on the trans-Mongolian express and find out.
Joining me on this trip was Miki, a Japanese pal who shares my
taste for travel without planning and who, thanks to years of
meditation, has no capacity to feel fear. Case in point: While
learning to drive a motorcycle, Miki once drove us both headfirst
into another vehicle. As we lay on the pavement, I asked if she
was OK. "Tanoshikatta," she said, "That was fun."
Arriving in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator, with no plans but
plenty of time, we went looking for a way into the outback. The
bulletin boards in cafes where travelers hang out had some
interesting ideas. "DRIVING OVERLAND TO MOSCOW.
CAN SPLIT GAS." "CYCLING TO TIBET." "GOOD HORSE
WITH SADDLE FOR SALE." Some reflect a certain oneupmanship in the independent travel world, where the more
primitive your locomotion, the better. "So, you cycled across
Morocco?" you might overhear. "Well, my wife and I took a
donkey across Antarctica." If you want to, Ulan Bator is a good
place to start that kind of adventure.
Unfortunately, we lacked the time for a trek to eastern Pakistan
via dogcart, so we started checking out slightly more modern
options. If the dogcart was too unpredictable, however, there
were also too many tours with too much organization for my
taste. There were many minibus tours, catering to backpackers,
which I am sure are fine—but they follow a fixed route that,
when we happened to cross it, lacked the magic of the
unexplored Mongolian outback.
More than anything in travel, I love the freedom to make my
own mistakes, which you might also call independence. We soon
figured out what that means in Mongolia: your own jeep and a
translator. That, plus the magic formula: the desire to go where
no one else goes.
We found what we were looking for one afternoon when we
wandered into a backstreet tour outfit. The office was equipped
with nothing but a giant map of Mongolia, a desk, and a young
woman with sharp green-blue eyes and an attitude to match. She
pointed at the outskirts of the country. "Go here," she said.
"You'll like it, and no one else has been there for years." We
were in.
She knew a good driver with a jeep, she said. And for a
translator/guide, did we want a man or a woman?
We hesitated.
"Get a woman," she said flatly, "She will cook better."
We nodded.
"I have a girl. She is very beautiful. You will like her. She
speaks good English and Japanese."
The next day, right on schedule, a light-blue Russian jeep
showed up at our apartment, driven by Bimba. Bimba, a bearlike
figure, was a retired nomad who had shifted careers from
herding sheep to herding tourists. He certainly remained in touch
with his roots—sometimes to a fault. He liked to drink (after
driving, usually), wrestle, and make large fires. His method for
making firewood, we would later discover, was to hoist a giant
boulder over his head and fling it at a pile of wood.
When we met our translator, Tula, we were in for a surprise.
Sweet and kind, she introduced herself in fluent German. "Guten
morgen!" Thanks to a last-minute switch, Tula spoke German,
decent Japanese, but not a word of English. Miki seemed
pleased. I decided to pretend I was living in an alternative future
where we'd lost World War II.
Tula, Bimba, Miki, and I boarded the jeep laden with food,
gasoline, and water, and we set our sights on a mountain about a
week's drive away, in an area unblessed by roads. Whether or
how we'd get there wasn't completely clear. There was certainly
some chance of being abandoned in the Gobi desert and eaten by
camels. But those kind of thoughts didn't stop Genghis Khan,
and they certainly weren't about to stop us.
From: Tim Wu
Subject: The Astonishing Hospitality of Rural Mongolians
Updated Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 7:17 AM ET
After some time driving around the Mongolian countryside, I hit
upon a great way to make new friends. It was simple: Draw a
line in the dirt, paw the earth a bit, and wrestle to the first fall.
Call me primitive, but there's something about fighting in the dirt
that seems to foster a certain kind of companionship. I don't take
this approach too far—at book parties, for instance, I tend to
stick with small talk. But in the middle of the Mongolian
nowhere, in a country where wrestling is the national sport,
there's just no better way to make pals. Brave Miki even took on
a few women, pitting what I imagined to be an interpretation of
Japanese sumo against the local technique.
As the wrestling story suggests, traveling in Mongolia forced me
to re-evaluate my own attitude about one of the greatest of travel
dilemmas: that whole "meeting the locals" thing. Call me a snob,
but I hate meeting the locals. I'm not really interested in the
locals back home, so why should things be any different
overseas?
You can't blame the locals. The problem is that most events
billed as a chance to "experience indigenous culture" tend to
range from the merely uncomfortable to the downright
nauseating. If you've ever, say, sat through a hula dance in
Hawaii, you know what I mean, but at least you know that's
fake. It's worse when a real native gets coerced into being your
friend. You get that creepy feeling that you are at a human zoo,
particularly if the poor guys are paid to put on feathers and
dance around.
But the most terrible things in life are bastardized versions of
great things—like bad marriages are to good ones or as fake
Parmesan cheese is to the real stuff. So it is with meeting the
locals. In Mongolia, the horrors of the forced encounter give
way to something much more natural, rewarding, and energizing
even for the most jaded traveler.
It all happens at the yurt (or ger, as they call them here). You
may just think of it as a big tent, but it's a lifestyle, and one that
takes some getting used to if you are accustomed to the idea of
"property" or the concept of "trespass." For the odd thing about
the Mongolian countryside, besides the lack of roads, fences,
and other indicia of civilization, is that anyone's ger is
potentially a rest stop, a play station, and, sometimes, a hotel.
One day, early in our jeep tour, I spotted a bucolic ger atop a
local hill, surrounded by intensely green grass and grazing
horses. "Nice place," I said to Tula, our translator/guide, in my
mix of broken German and Japanese.
Tula said something to Bimba, who took a hard right and
launched our Russian jeep up the hill. I had thought of the ger
rather as if it were part of a landscape painting, not something
you might actually interact with. But within minutes, we had
landed on the front lawn like a light-blue flying saucer. Out
jumped Bimba, shouting, "Hold your dogs!" to the family. (They
held them.) Without any further ceremony, he swung open the
door to their home, beckoned us to enter, and plopped down as if
he were taking a break in his own living room.
I was, to say the least, taken aback, and prepared to be thrown
out. But to my surprise, our hosts seemed cool with our invasion
of their living room. It was as if a groovy steppe party were in
progress, and we were somehow on the guest list.
Our hosts served "tea" (though what Mongolians call tea you
might call salty sheep's milk mixed with parts of the tea plant
that the rest of the world throws away). We chatted while
Bimba, right at home, borrowed a needle and thread to reattach a
button to his shirt. After tea, out came a strong, clear liquor
distilled from horse milk, and in no time we were roaring with
laughter like old friends. Our host caught me eying the horses
and suggested I take one for a ride, the way your friend's dad
might let you use the motorboat at his cottage. Minutes later, I
was thundering through the hills at top speed, whooping and
hollering—my distaste for locals gone forever. Forget the feather
dances, this was a kind of indigenous experience I could get
used to.
And so it was through the rest of our trip. Hanging out and
getting drunk at local settlements made what might have been a
boring trip more like a magical mystery tour. However romantic
a road trip may sound, riding for days in a bumpy, un-airconditioned jeep can take its toll. There are only so many times
in one day that you can bash your head against the roof of a
vehicle and remain in good spirits.
It sure helped that every settlement was like a friend's summer
home. Within limits, you can drink, hang out, milk goats, go
hunting or hiking, and maybe buy an animal and kill it for food
(more on that later in the week). There isn't much by way of,
say, coffee shops or opera houses in the countryside, but that
doesn't matter much when every settlement does double duty.
If this all sounds like some kind of communal anarchy, it isn't
quite. You can't just go to Mongolia and jump on the first horse
you see. It's bad manners actually to plan to sleep in someone's
ger—you use your own tent unless it's raining. Mongolia is not
Burning Man or one big hippie commune—it's just a very
friendly place.
If you've traveled a lot, you may be suspicious of the kind of
friendliness I am describing. "What a sucker," you may be
thinking, "I bet he got cleaned out later." Who among us has not
had the experience of making a new friend overseas only to find
the local gift shop forms the glue in your relationship? But
believe me, in the Mongolian outback, there are no gift shops.
It's not even clear what they would sell, unless maybe you
wanted to get your hands on some stuffed marmots.
There's a Greek myth in which Zeus and Hermes disguise
themselves as needy travelers to test a town, curious to see who
is willing to give them shelter. Most of the population fails, of
course, and the angry gods send them to Hades. I'm pretty sure
that's where most of us would end up today. The story seems to
express a moral principle that is so generally lost—that you
should welcome lost travelers—it is almost quaint. But for now,
and for as long as it lasts, rural Mongolians are among the few
people in the world I've met who truly and unquestionably pass
the test.
From: Tim Wu
Subject: Get Your Cowboy On
Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 7:17 AM ET
Like many young men who grew up in North America, I have
had my share of cowboy fantasies. To be clear, I'm not talking
about the fantasy of having sex with a cowboy (a legitimate,
though alternative, form) but, rather, the fantasy of being a
cowboy with boots, a horse, and a gun, roaming around the
West. But there's a big problem: To see the American West as it
was, you'd have to uninvent a lot of stuff, starting with barbed
wire and trains and ending up at paved highways, strip malls,
and air conditioning. Yes, all that may fade into dust in another
200 years or so. Unfortunately, we'll all be dead by then, too.
The good news is, if you did uninvent all the stuff that ruined the
American West, the place would resemble Mongolia. Deep
Mongolia is fenceless, roadless, and above all empty. It is
populated mostly by wandering herds, tended by men on
horseback or motorcycle, and has little else. It is, in short,
completely irresistible to a cowboy fantasist.
Every day you see stuff in Mongolia that screams cowboy. In the
morning, cowboys on horseback herd yaks, sheep, or camels out
for grazing, and in the evening, the women go out and milk the
beasts. Now and then, you may see men breaking in a bucking
wild horse. In the small towns—often just a few buildings set
out on the plains—you run into old cowboys wandering around
drunk, as if you're in Tombstone, Ariz., and they've just come
back from boozing with Doc Holliday.
That said, I'll admit that being in Central Asia does require
certain adjustments. The horse saddles are generally made of
wood. You don't pound whisky in the saloon; instead, you drink
fermented horse milk in a ger. And the guns you'll see are old
Soviet bolt-action models, not Winchester repeaters.
Traveling through deeper Mongolia is also a chance in this life
to see what it is about the "endless plains" that once inspired so
much writing and thought. There are places in America that are
pretty empty. But endlessly empty is different. It means land free
of any road or fence as far as the eye can see, and then beyond
that, and then beyond that. The plains begin to feel more like
ocean than land, open to being crossed in any way you'd like,
free and unending. You start to realize how much your daily
decisions are driven by paths, streets, and fences. Forget about
the road less traveled and think no road at all.
After about a week of driving mixed with riding, we'd reached
that mountain we spotted on the map back in Ulan Bator. We
had reached the edge of the Altai range, just out of the Gobi
desert, near the Chinese border. There we camped in a high
plateau next to a single family's gers, sheep, and horses. We
were their first foreign visitors in 17 years—the last was a
Japanese fellow who lived in a tent for a year to study marmots.
Miki and I went with one of the men to climb our
target, that mountain peak, on horseback. The
horses were pretty uncooperative—"The horse
thinks you are a fool," said Miki, unhelpfully,
though I didn't see her galloping up the mountain,
either. We had brought along Soviet rifles and
bullets, but after some would-be target practice, I
realized that my chances of hitting a marmot were
zero, and so did our guide. As we neared the top of
the mountain, he left some food behind and
abruptly disappeared—not for a few minutes, but
for a few hours. We never made the summit. Later,
I realized that he had left us to graze, as if we
were a strange breed of horse, while he made
some serious efforts to catch our dinner.
I took my evolving attitude toward animal scat as a measure of
my adjustment to life on the plains. When they needed to start a
fire in the middle of nowhere, cowboys relied on cow chips,
which is a euphemism for cow feces. Before Mongolia, like
most urban Americans, my views on animal excrement were
largely negative. That changed. Animal feces began to take on a
new and more precious meaning—as a valuable and somewhat
scarce commodity good for building a fire with. I knew I had
reached a turning point when I began to handle yak patties with
my bare hands. Mentally, feces had become just an oddly shaped
form of wood. And, hell, a good dung fire keeps the bugs away.
Since we're talking about cowboys, I can't close this entry
without tackling a somewhat sensitive topic: Asian manhood.
There is a widely held stereotype that, samurais and Bruce Lee
aside, East Asian men are not particularly masculine. I hate to
admit it, but as with many stereotypes, there's some truth to this.
Take my native Taiwan: Good food? Yes. Friendly? Yes.
Macho? Not at all. Many Taiwanese men consider it perfectly
normal to fill their cars with stuffed animals. More broadly, male
pop stars across East Asia have a disturbing tendency to look
exactly like the teenage girls who are their biggest fans.
Please don't get angry about this. It's true that Western popular
culture tends to emasculate Asian men. I am also aware that
cultural ideals of manhood vary, and that Taiwanese men are
more likely to express their masculinity in other ways, like
collecting tea pots or chewing on betel nuts. But rough and
tough they aren't. And some of this gives Asian men outside
Asia something of a complex.
into alcohol. Camel's milk, I shudder to recall, is musky and
feels like drinking bottled smoke. (I think I finally understand
why Camel is a brand of cigarettes.) Consider also that
Mongolians like their milk heavily salted, and the phrase
acquired taste takes on new meaning.
The antidote to any idea that this might be a racial, as opposed to
cultural, trait is a trip to Mongolia. Mongolian men in the
countryside spend their time riding horses, killing animals, and
breaking firewood. They tend to hold their face in a fixed
grimace. At times, it is like a country of Daniel Craig
impersonators. Along with parts of Latin America, it's probably
the most macho place I've ever been. And so, my Asian brothers,
if you ever want to know what the extremes of Eastern manhood
look like, forget about Jet Li or even Bruce Lee. It's Mongolia
where Asia gets tough.
As an all-dairy nation, and probably the world's worst place to
be a vegan, Mongolia is very cheese-centric. I am below no man
in my taste for what some people might describe as abhorrent
forms of cheese. I like English cheddars that have gone rotten
and overaged gorgonzola that has turned brown. But the problem
with Mongolian "cheese" is that it is nearly as hard as rock and
as acidic as battery acid. Eating it is not horrific, but it is rather
exhausting.
From: Tim Wu
Subject: The Most Disgusting Food. Ever.
Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET
I have eaten my fair share of food that some people might label
"gross." There was even a time, in my early 20s, when I made
quite a habit of it. Pigs' ears or fried crickets? Please. That's kids'
stuff. I prefer to test my limits: Pass the duck brains.
It is a test of will, not unlike diving off a high cliff, when you
order your hand to put something into your mouth while every
instinct screams, "No!" And sometimes a food that looks strange
can be quite pleasant in ways you don't expect. I have fond
memories of the time I ate a squirming live octopus tentacle in
Korea—not only did it taste pretty good, it also brought fond
memories of a woman who used to twirl her tongue while
French kissing. I wish I could say that snake blood brought on
fond memories, but it just tasted like a nosebleed. On the happier
side, I can report that deep-fried scorpion tastes just like cricket.
Unfortunately, none of this prepared me for the culinary horrors
of Mongolia. I, who consider myself the owner of an iron will
and a stomach to match, still shudder when I think about some of
the things I ate and drank there. There were times when I longed
for a nice plate of deep-fried scorpions.
If you have ever wondered why we generally drink cow's milk, I
can tell you: Most of the other types of milk are just disgusting.
They get under your skin in a special dairy sort of way, rather
like eating a stick of butter every morning might. Forced to
choose, I think I'd say the best is yak milk, especially if it's hot.
But I would stay away from horse milk unless it's been distilled
All this is surely survivable. It is the mutton, the unending
mutton, that gets to you. After just a week, I felt like the Troll in
The Hobbit who complains, "Mutton yesterday, mutton today,
and blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer."
The common complaint about mutton is that it is gamey.
Granted. But the insidious part is not so much the flavor as the
smell. When I returned to Beijing, Evan Osnos, now at The New
Yorker, who has done some great writing on Mongolia's gold
rush, asked me, "So, do you still smell like mutton?"
I did.
To be fair, Mongolian cuisine had certain satisfactions. After a
day of hard riding, gnawing on mutton bones seemed entirely
appropriate. Mutton dumplings and mutton mixed with noodles
can sometimes be good. And after a while, I developed a taste
for fermented horse milk, particularly when distilled to a clear
liquor—though it may have just been that a few shots did
wonders for the mutton.
I can also report that Mongolian vodka did the job, though I
wasn't that excited about Bimba's way of preparing it. In the
morning, large black beetles would gather under our tent seeking
warmth. Bimba thought it a good idea to flavor the vodka with a
few of these beetles—their death throes adding a Genghis Khan
touch to the whole thing.
On our very last morning on the road, the mutton problem
became a crisis. At fault was our dear driver, Bimba, who
decided it was time to celebrate the trip by buying a whole sheep
and slaughtering it. As we went into a local ger to eat breakfast,
I noticed that the sheep's head had been removed, and the
internal organs were being poured into a giant pot, the same way
you might empty a can of beans.
Surely this was to feed the dogs, I thought. No one really wants
to eat the lungs, stomach, and intestines of an aged sheep.
Au contraire. I'm sorry to say that we had to watch the whole
mess boiling for a while on the dung fire, yielding bubbles of
brownish-gray scum. Afterward, a giant steaming bowl of
internal organs was placed before us with some ceremony. Out
came knives and a mixture of anatomy lesson and breakfast as
we sampled one organ after another. I must stress the degree to
which our dear friend Bimba considered this the way to cement
our friendship. There was no backing away from trying each and
every organ and making a good go of the whole thing. Even
fearless Miki looked a little pale.
Comparatively speaking, I suppose the stomach and heart were
the highlights. Despite our host's enthusiasm, I felt there was
something deeply fishy about the lungs—they had a spongy
texture that you had to bite hard to get through. There were
many organs that I didn't really recognize but also did not enjoy.
And as for the intestines and connecting flesh covered with fat, I
felt, for the first time, what 19th-century writers refer to as "rising
bile." I said to myself, "This is like a horror film, except I am
eating the special effects."
All the while, the sheep's severed head sat off to one side,
watching us sadly. Next to him sat his forearms and legs, placed
in a small pile. But fear not. We did pack that head into our jeep,
and back in the capital, we ate him for lunch. "Omoshirokatta,"
said Miki. "That was interesting!"
From: Tim Wu
Subject: Imperial Bones
Posted Friday, September 26, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
In deep Mongolia there are bones, and lots of them. The sheep,
horses, and camels wandering around die occasionally and
become skeletons. There isn't anyone to get rid of the bones, so
they remain like fallen trees in a redwood forest, forming part of
the landscape and slowly dissolving into it. Sometimes, there are
so many skulls lying around that you feel you're on a film set.
I had thought that the process by which a dead animal becomes a
skeleton might be gradual and dignified, but no, sir. Early one
morning, I noticed a horse had died not far from camp. A flock
of vultures were flapping around pulling strips of bloody meat
off the carcass. As I watched, a pack of nasty-looking dogs
arrived, chased away the vultures, and began to tear the horse
into pieces.
While watching, I had the horrible realization that were I to be
thrown off my horse later that day, I would be the subject of the
feeding frenzy. I pictured my arms and legs being dragged off
for later consumption. I saw loyal Miki jumping off her horse to
fight a growling dog for my left leg, while a vulture pecked its
way through the tattoo on my left arm. Though perhaps it should
be obvious, I suddenly understood why we bury dead people or
throw them on the fire: It's so they don't become dog food. In
less than two hours, a recognizable horse carcass had become a
scattered pile of white bones.
Bones, and scattered ones at that, are all that is left of the
Mongolian empire, once the mightiest on earth. After being
picked and pulled apart, it has faded back into the landscape,
leaving almost nothing behind. What's left behind for the visitor
is one big question: How did a country resembling a lessdeveloped version of Wyoming conquer and run a gigantic
empire reaching from China through the Middle East in the first
place? Realizing that this nation of yak- and sheep-herders was
for a time the world's greatest military power is a little like
finding out that the local convenience store clerk was once a
ninja assassin.
If you look carefully, there are little signs. The Mongolians walk
or ride around like lords of the earth, which, in the Mongolian
countryside, they are. Rural Mongolians spend a good amount of
time on horseback, suggesting that a cavalry could be raised very
quickly. Genghis Khan's face appears on the national vodka
brand—perhaps he would leap out of the bottle if you rubbed it
the right way. The empire might be just resting: After the
nuclear holocaust, the Mongolian hordes will emerge from their
gers and retake the world.
For Mongolians, what really rankles is the whole China thing.
Rural Mongolians may not care much about the rest of the
world, but the exception is China, which everyone seems to hate,
as you will discover from even a short conversation. To be fair,
it must be kind of annoying to have the country you used to run
trying to boss you around. (How England puts up with this kind
of thing from its former American colonies is a total mystery.)
Yet since many of Mongolia's imported goods come from China,
the Chinese can—and do—block the borders and drive up
Mongolian prices, almost at will. Because of that, they feel they
have the right to boss Mongolia around.
Worse, about half of the Mongolian nation is under Chinese rule,
in what the Chinese call "Inner Mongolia." Many Mongolians
think of Inner Mongolia as a colony or occupied territory, like
Tibet (though, to be fair, control of the territory has shifted back
and forth over the centuries). There is even an Inner Mongolian
independence party, which is probably as popular in Beijing as
the Dalai Lama's speaking tour.
After what felt like a new childhood, the trip was coming to its
end. I began to wonder what the Mongolians, the great empire of
the 13th century, think about America, the power of the 21 st.
Sitting in a ger back at the mountain plateau, I remembering
asking some new friends which Americans they knew of. There
was a long, empty pause.
"Schwarzenegger."
It is moments like these that create the Mongolia obsession.
Back in Ulan Bator, we ate the last of the mutton in Bimba's
apartment, where, chatting with Tula, I noticed that my German
was the best it had been in years. We said goodbye to the blue
jeep, Miki lugging a large yak skull she had found somewhere
along the way.
I left feeling that Mongolians, especially in the countryside, had
adjusted well to their transition from the world's greatest power
to the world's toughest sheep herders. The best explanation of
their attitude I have heard came from Bill Siemering, who was
NPR's first program director. They ruled the world and left their
mark everywhere. But now, he says, "Mongolians live in the
present."
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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