Saturday, April 22, 2006

22 Apr 2006 11:59 pm

Four's a nightmare

Slate's Will Saletan has a smart take on "Big Love" that gets to the heart of why my extra-spouse fantasy would, in reality, be such a disaster. Heavy sigh.

--Michelle

 

22 Apr 2006 05:35 pm

Alone Together

Eating dinner at a bar the other night, I sat next to a sales rep for a company that produces portable home dialysis units. He was drinking pretty hard, celebrating a deal that he'd just closed and telling me how soaring diabetes rates were going to create ever greater demand for his revolutionary product. I thought he was going to propose a toast to kidney failure.

But what bothered me most about our conversation was the streamlined plastic phone device implanted in his right ear and connected via Bluetooth to the Palm Treo lying on the bar in front of him. Every minute or two the earjack would light up, suddenly pulsing white and blue, and I'd forget whatever I was saying to him or whatever he was saying to me. Finally, I asked him what the light was. "That just means the thing's turned on," he said. As he said this, he was looking at his Treo screen, which he did about every thirty or forty seconds. His face changed -- had some important message arrived? Still speaking to me, but without much focus now, he tapped out a line or two of text with his amazingly prehensile thumbs. He'd left the scene, I sensed; he was somewhere else. At headquarters, perhaps. And I'd been placed on hold.

I didn't like it. I never like it. And it happens constantly. I'll be in the middle of what I take to be a sincere human interaction with somebody and they'll start cutting in and out -- checking the Blackberry, texting on the cell phone, stylus-ing the electronic calendar. No apologies, either. No 'excuse mes.' As though a mixture of physical proximity and electronic separation is the accepted new mode of social togetherness. I swear I've seen couples out on dates who speak to each other only when the menu comes, to negotiate their appetizers, and then drift off into conversations with others until the check arrives.

And yet they call it "communications technology."

When the dialysis salesman returned to earth, I committed a faux pas by asking him what he'd just been writing about. I thought I was entitled to ask this question because he'd been conducting his business in front of me. I found out otherwise. He glared at me. What kind of spying busybody was I? The warmth between us never returned and we ate our salads in different universes, staring at the TV behind the bar. The light in his earjack pulsed. I paid my tab. When I left, I mumbled a goodbye, but the salesman didn't acknowledge it. He was tapping on his keys.

--Walter

22 Apr 2006 03:20 pm

Score one for Nancy Reagan's team

I see in today's New York Times that a state judge ruled yesterday that two lawsuits disputing the constitutionality of California's fledgling stem cell research agency, the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, have no merit. Brought by attorneys with ties to anti-abortion groups, the suits claimed that because Prop 71, the 2004 ballot initiative funding the agency, authorized money for both stem cell and other types of medical research, it violated a state law prohibiting a ballot measure from proposing more than one issue. Judge Bonnie Lewman Sabraw of the Alameda County Superior Court basically dismissed these claims as the bologna that they reek of.

Good. I'm not denying that there are delicate ethical concerns that need to be addressed in regards to stem cell research. And I keep hoping the federal government will get fully into the game in order to help keep an eye on just such issues. But on the whole, the potential benefits of this field appear to outweigh the costs. And while I understand social conservatives' moral objections to stem cell research, I'm disinclined to take them seriously until I see pro-life picketers also take on the IVF industry, which is busy creating scads of excess embryos that will never, ever see the inside of a warm womb and will ultimately be tossed out with the trash.

Sadly, the Institute for Regenerative Medicine has to wait until the appeals process has been exhausted until it can start selling securities to raise grant money. (Until then, it's using loans from philanthropic groups.) Here's hoping the higher courts' jurists have noses as well-refined as Judge Sabraw's.

--Michelle

Friday, April 21, 2006

21 Apr 2006 04:44 pm

Ick

Page A3 of today's Washington Post has a large photo of a sobbing woman standing beside another sad-looking younger woman. The headline above: "Family Grieves Over Death of 10-Year-Old." The caption below: "Jennifer Fox, right, mother of Jamie Rose Bolin, stands with her daugher, Lori Dawn Headrick, during a funeral service yesterday for 10-year-old Jamie at Purcell High School in Purcell, Okla. She was found slain last week."

That's it. No accompanying article. No instructions to turn to another page. No nothing. The extent of this "news" tidbit is a photo of a grieving mom and her surviving child. At first, I could not fathom why the Post would be running such a pic without any related story. An unaccompanied photo of Bush and Hu jogging, or even of Donald Rumsfeld sunbathing, I could understand. But despite the impact of shark-attack-and-child-snatching-obsessed cable news on journalism at large, surely not every youngster's death calls for having the faces of sobbing family members splashed across the pages of a major daily several hundred miles away. 

A quick nexis search reveals that the details of poor Jamie's murder were indeed gruesome, involving (as briefly as possible) a mentally unstable neighbor, a cutting board, suffocation, sexual assault, and some disturbing blog entries about cannibalism. But only people already following this case--which has, unsurprisingly, been all the rage on CNN--would understand the point of today's Post pic. Clearly the paper is trying to have it both ways: It wants to signal to readers that it is still keeping an eye on this sensational story, yet it doesn't want to stoop to rehashing any of the grisly details and open itself to accusations that it has adopted cable's tabloid mentality. So it runs an exploitative, seemingly pointless photo without any explanation.

Pompous, tawdry, and confusing. Quite a journalistic achievement. 

--Michelle

21 Apr 2006 03:32 pm

MyCrime.Com

At least the high-school students in Kansas who decided to shoot up their school but were stopped before they could because they first wrote about their plot on MySpace.Com already have an insanity defense.

Can a craving for attention drive people crazy? It seems to have in this case. The motivation for the crime was also, here, the motivation for discussing the crime online, and that has proved fortunate. But it makes me wonder if these sort of massacres-as-spectacle aren't the defining offenses of our time. Even politically-motivated terrorism seems to be an effort to garner publicity.

There's something about the world these days that brings out the worst in the lonely and the obscure and feeds their grudges until they grow enormous. And I don't think it's violent video games and movies. I don't think it's access to firearms. I think it's the simple message that you're not anyone until you've done something worthy of media coverage, whatever that thing may be. The star-system has become a kind of moral code with only one commandment: Thou Shalt Not Go Unnoticed. When the concept of fame broke free from its old grounding in the concept of public virtue -- when it was supplanted by the lesser idea of Warhol-ish celebrity -- the lid was off the jar.

Luckily (I think), the Web has come along, where anyone can make his presence felt -- or have the illusion of making his presence felt -- without having to perpetrate a sensational crime. The Kansas kids were eager to do both, of course, and they foiled themselves. Perhaps the Web's promise of liberating people from anonymity will aggravate their mania, but here's hoping it will bleed it off some.

--Walter

21 Apr 2006 01:36 pm

Gasbags

Today's New York Times has a front-pager that could have been run dozens of times over the past few years: "Democrats Eager to Exploit Anger Over Gas Price." In fact, during the last presidential race, I wrote a column outlining why the Dems' attempts to use high gas prices as an election year rallying cry were completely understandable--as well as shameless, dishonest, and ultimately doomed to failure.

With the public growing ever more hostile toward the party in power, it's entirely possible that pump prices will prove a more successful weapon for Dems this time around. But that doesn't make their exploitation of the issue any more honest or less shameless. I mean, does anyone really believe Dems would have done a better job of tackling our long-term energy crisis--much less short-term gas prices--than the Bushies have? And I say this in the context of the Bushies having tackled bupkiss. I like to kick around the administration as much as anyone, but on the issue of energy, neither party seems able to free itself from some ugly combination of knee-jerk ideology and special-interest money long enough to get serious about hashing out a workable compromise.

Take the excruciatingly annoying issue of ANWR: Some days it seems that any piece of legislation having anything to do with energy or the environment comes to a screeching halt at the feet of almighty ANWR. Enough already. The Dems should stop fetishizing this remote piece of wilderness, and the Republicans should stop pretending that drilling there will make any real dent in our dependence on foreign oil. At this point, Dems should use the oversized ANWR bargaining chip to extract some massive compromise from Republicans on an issue that would have an even bigger environmental impact, such as raising fuel-economy standards or (gasp!) establishing a federal gas tax--an idea that even conservatives like Charles Krauthammer have touted. Alas, since ANWR is what drives environmental activists to distraction, we can expect Dems to keep babbling about the caribou until we all choke to death on a cloud of SUV exhaust.

Admittedly, I'm slow to get worked up about most environmental crusades. It's not that I'm unsympathetic or consider them unimportant; I just tend to obsess about other issues. But one of those issues is our national security--which is increasingly tied to our energy needs. For a primer on how the parties let the politics of energy trump both environmental and security concerns, check out this 2002 piece by Gregg Easterbrook. What may be most disturbing about the piece is how little has changed in the four years since it ran.   

--Michelle

Thursday, April 20, 2006

20 Apr 2006 07:14 pm

Insert off-color intern joke here

One Georgetown University wit had this response to my polygamy item:

"What you've described sounds suspiciously like the role of an unpaid intern. Which, come to think of it, is actually a good idea; we have internships to allow kids to learn the ropes of all sorts of jobs before they actually dive in these days.  Why not create a few more that get some work done around the house?  As a still-deathly-scared-of-commitment 20 year old, I hereby sign myself up to be your martini mixer and slipper fetcher so I can see what all the big fuss is about."

Alas, I suspect my husband won't be that enthusiastic about this kind offer--unless, come to think of it, this 20-year-old of undisclosed gender looks a lot like Salma Hayek.

--Michelle

20 Apr 2006 06:57 pm

Dems Beware

The general consensus is that, title change notwithstanding, Rove will retain his big-dog status at the White House. Even so, having been asked to relinquish part of his official portfolio in a move that some folks might perceive as a demotion is unlikely to sit well with Bush's Brain. If I were a Democratic strategist, I'd be awfully uneasy at the thought of a brassed off Rove with extra time on his hands and a driving need to salvage his rep and cement his legacy with a big win in November. If you thought his winged monkeys played rough in past elections, just wait.

--Michelle 

20 Apr 2006 05:47 pm

Three's Company

So I'm watching an "encore presentation" of HBO's new polygamy-themed hit, "Big Love," last night, when it occurs to me: What a huge number of modern married couples need is an extra wife. No, not for procreative purposes or even to share the burden of household chores (though I don't know anyone who'd turn down an extra set of laundry-folding hands). But if all the articles, books, and polling about stressed-out women struggling to have-it-all are any indication, many marriages clearly could use someone to fulfill the traditional (perhaps partly apocryphal?) role of the patient, attentive, supportive emotional rock of the family--you know, the kind of wife who greets you at the door each evening with your slippers and a martini, assures you that everything on the homefront is running smoothly, and insists that you tell her all about your hard day at the office.

As it is, in many two-career households in particular, although both spouses strive to be supportive and attentive, often they're both a little too preoccupied with their own attempts to juggle work and home life to provide adequate comfort. An additional wife--or husband (since limiting this discussion to polygyny would, after all, be inexcusably sexist)--could go a long way toward smoothing out some of those whose-turn-is-it-to-take-the-dog-to-the-vet bumps along the road to domestic bliss. Provided, of course, that the new spouse understood his or her role as domestic cheerleader-in-chief.

Save your disgruntled emails. Obviously I'm not serious about this. But you can't blame a gal for fantasizing. I do so love a good martini.

--Michelle

20 Apr 2006 04:26 pm

Stay High

Every time I fill in on this blog (well, both times) the price of gas has risen to a new peak and I, as well as hundreds of other journalists, have tried to make something interesting of the fact. Will America finally get serious about conserving? Will Detroit go full-tilt producing hybrids? Will commuters stay home and work over the Web? It's pretty boring and tiring, actually -- almost as much so as the speculation about whether the high prices are manipulated by the oil companies, dictated by speculators, or reflective of actual dwindling reserves. The debate seems easy to settle but it never is, nor is the question of whether the big run-up will prove transitory or semi-permanent.

And just when these articles have all been written, in all their variations, the price slides down again and people go back to doing as they did and driving whatever they drove before as far and as often as they ever drove it, while listening to pretty music .

Perhaps that's why this time I wouldn't be disappointed if fate just split the difference in the whole cycle and gas prices stayed where they are now. Then I might be able to adapt to them. Then I might finally relinquish my fantasy of buying a 300 hp sports coupe that only uses premium. My best trick so far is to set a dollar limit every time I open my gas cap. The concept is to always spend the same amount -- say fifty bucks-- and drive as far as I can on what it buys me but not a mile more. It works for a week or two but then it doesn't work due to the same sort of sloppy, self-serving accounting that causes me about once or twice a year to ditch my HBO while, with the other hand, I buy more cell-phone minutes.

A soon as prices drop, I stop playing my mental gas games and do as alcoholics do when they pick up the bottle again after a period of sobriety: guzzle to beat hell. It might be my last opportunity, I reason, before gas goes to fifteen bucks a liter. Boy, do I make hay. It's the opposite of conservation. It's the opposite of learning one's lesson. It's desperate and slightly euphoric and, I'm convinced now, it makes not a dimple in the vast reserves that economists always point out are still around no matter what the prices on the pump read.

And as yo-yo dieters know, binging and starving corrupts one's whole metabolism. That's where I am now with gasoline. Nothing anyone tells me seems believable, no disciplined program of consumption seems rational and nothing I read on the subject seems relevant. For all I know, when oil truly runs short the price of gas will plunge and plunge until there are only twenty gallons left which no one will want, so they'll pour them on the ground.

Tomorrow I have a trip planned. Eight hundred miles of interstate. It might be cheaper to fly but I might never get this chance again.

--Walter

20 Apr 2006 10:24 am

Here's your hat...

Poor Scott McClellan. Even after all this administration has put him through, the departing press secretary got all choked up yesterday as Bush was announcing his early retirement. I know much of the media corps (specifically, those who had to deal with him regularly) had their issues with McClellan, but I always felt sorry for the guy. Clearly his tenure was more contentious than that of predecessor Ari Fleischer, in part because McClellan occupied the podium during more troubled times than Ari. But I also think McClellan had a harder time in the job because, deep down, he was more uncomfortable being dishonest. McClellan always looked strained and slightly gassy when dishing out whatever bologna the administration had fed him. By contrast, Ari, as my colleague Jon Chait detailed long ago, has always had a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward truth-telling.   

--Michelle

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

19 Apr 2006 05:20 pm

Forever Young

At the Livingston, Montana coffee shop where I've been forced to work this week due to an Internet meltdown at my farm, they play a lot of Bob Dylan on the stereo, especially a lot of sixties Dylan. This means that while I'm poking around the Web, reading stories about Donald Rumseld and how the White House is 'shaking' itself up by unloading its top media liason and forcing Karl Rove to give up his 'policy' duties and concentrate on 'politics' (a distinction whose very existence pretty much sums up what's wrong in Washington), I get to hear 'Masters of War' and 'Hard Rain' in the background. The songs haven't dated. They've matured. What seems dated are current events, which seem so much like events from forty years ago that I wasn't surprised to read this morning that Neil Young is releasing a new album that sounds as though it will be filled with protest songs similar to the ones he used to sing during the last big civil war that we inflamed by trying to stop.

I'm a fan of Neil Young, and yet I'm not so sure I want to hear this album. Nor would I be eager to jump up and buy a new Dylan album with the same concept. I sense self-imitation in the air. I sense too much satisfaction all around. "You loved it when they took on Johnson, but you'll be ecstatic when they slam Bush!" It's not that Young's not perfectly entitled to a political second act, it's that his musical protests this time will come with a stamp of cultural approval and a solid-gold provenance that will make them too respectable, I fear. Lashing out against power just isn't the same when an artist can be assured, up front, that he'll be loved and applauded for doing so just as he was when he did it before, when it was a risk.

"I ain't going to work on Maggie's farm no more." The song was playing as I wrote this. It's got one of those lyrics that seem applicable to about a million situations then and now and in the future. Rebellion. Frustration. Humiliation. Come-uppance. The fundamental human right to be a squirelly, ungovernable wise-ass (as long as one can handle the whippings it brings.) A song of vignettes, of savage little sketches. A song which doesn't need a sequel.

--Walter

19 Apr 2006 04:05 pm

Playdate, anyone?

Since Walter has brought up the newest addition to the Tom & Katie freak show, I gotta ask: Does it strike anyone besides me as eerily coincidental that the TomKat daughter arrived on the same day that the stork also delivered a baby girl to Brooke Shields, Cruise's nemesis in the Scientologist vs. psychiatry debate? Conspiracy theories welcome.

--Michelle

19 Apr 2006 02:59 pm

Save the Children

If unborn children really had rights, the infant daughter of the actress Katie Holmes and the temporarily-humanoid immortal starseed that styles itself 'Tom Cruise' would have been delivered by a lawyer. Breaking the absolute silence of the delivery room, the lawyer, on the infant's behalf, would have sued for spiritual guardianship and demanded that all profits earned from sale of the child's story and image-- including 'virtual' profits in the form of publicity for its parents -- be deposited in a trust account to fund its lifelong psychotherapy needs. It would also be stipulated that such therapy could not be interfered with or curtailed by 'Cruise' or his religious representatives.

Of all the world's great traditions of exploitation -- master over slave, husband over wife, rich man over poor man-- parenthood is the most absolute and the least subject to scrutiny or pressure. Not only do the stronger parties involved have the right to construct the weaker one's reality and then imprison their subject inside of it, they have the right to create the subject at a moment not of its choosing and not necessarily to its advantage. For Holmes and 'Cruise' to have marched a helpless new spirit into the global media s***-storm that they, their publicists and their clerical overseers have been whipping up for many months now should not only be an actionable infraction but a grave reminder to all of us not to toy around with unformed soul material.

Suri, lovely child, you are free. You just don't know it yet. You don't even have to, ultimately, keep that name they gave you. You can be an 'Amy' like your friends. None of what happened is your responsibility. Your mother, she chose to relinquish her personal liberty. Your father, he chose to forsake his humanness. But you, at eighteen, as an American citizen and-- in the words of the Desiderata-- 'a child of the universe' will have the right to hop any bus you want and take it as far as you want and never return.

I'm a stranger, child, but I'm a parent, too, and on behalf of many millions of parents who cherish the awesome power that we wield over those who come to earth with none , I make you this promise:

You shall be released.

--Walter

19 Apr 2006 02:10 pm

A he-man for the Dems

I’m pleased to report that I’ve begun receiving semi-regular emails from the Jim Webb for Senate campaign. For those not paying attention, Webb is the Vietnam War hero who went on to become Secretary of the Navy (he briefly served under the Gipper before resigning over planned military budget cuts) and then a successful novelist (his “Fields of Fire” is considered quite good), and who is now running as a Democrat to unseat Republican Sen. George Allen in Virginia. (For a taste of Webb’s military years check out Robert Timberg’s celebrated “The Nightingale’s Song.”)

At this point, Allen enjoys a fat lead--20-plus points according to the last poll I saw. But the race is still young and Webb could prove a formidable opponent. For starters, the guy is a military legend with a record on which it will be tough for the GOP to work its increasingly popular trash-the-veteran strategy.

Just as importantly, Webb has a strong, clearly articulated foreign policy vision that just so happens to clash with the current administration’s. Namely, Webb fits into Walter Russell Mead’s Jacksonian school, while the Bushies are currently of a Wilsonian bent. (In summarizing the four schools of thought laid out in Mead’s “Special Providence,” allow me to swipe a graph from tnr colleague Peter Beinart, for whom this issue has become an obsession: “Wilsonians believe America must make the world safe for liberty. Hamiltonians believe America must make the world safe for commerce. Jeffersonians fear that both of these crusades threaten liberty at home. And Jacksonians believe in destroying America's enemies and defending America 's sovereignty, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.”)

Anyway, as a proud Jacksonian, Webb won't be vulnerable to the usual criticism that Democrats don’t have a foreign policy position other than “Bush bad.” You may not agree with Webb’s vision, but the man clearly has one and is unafraid to talk about it. (Check out his site for recent articles and speeches.) So while it may be that the colorful, outspoken Webb is ultimately unelectable--this is the guy, after all, who penned a 1979 piece for The Washingtonian entitled, “Women Can’t Fight"--at the very least, Rove, Mehlman, and the rest of the GOP smear hounds will have to find a fresh line of assault.

--Michelle

19 Apr 2006 01:02 pm

Paging Karen Hughes

The more I think about it, the more astonished I am that even this President, not exactly known for his verbal grace under pressure, would come out with a bone-headed remark like "I'm the decider." If Karen were around, you can bet this wouldn't have happened.

--Michelle

19 Apr 2006 12:51 pm

Father Knows Squat

“I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.” Thus spake Presidnt Bush in yesterday’s Rose Garden defense of his embattled Defense Secretary. And there, in a nutshell, is the Bush governing philosophy. I know best. Period. Leave everything to me. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Don’t question my decisions. Don’t bother looking at the facts—at least, not at any facts that might contradict my version of reality. And don’t you dare criticize my decisions unless you want to wind up branded an unpatriotic, fuzzy-headed, soft-on-terrorist type.

I can see how, once upon a time, this sort of macho, decisive, take-no-prisoners, govern-with-your-gut approach to the presidency had a certain appeal. Who wants a wishy-washy leader when the Islamist baddies are plotting the nation’s demise? And even if we suspected Bush wasn’t exactly the most curious or engaged or well-informed commander-in-chief, we were assured that he had a gift for picking smart, curious, engaged, talented advisers—people with “good hearts”--who would keep our CEO-president just informed enough to make good decisions.

But three-plus years of Iraq have pretty much shown the absurdity of that claim. Or at least it has introduced enough doubt into the equation that we really ought to demand more of an explanation for the seemingly ill-advised actions (or inaction) of our leader other than: “I’m the Daddy, that’s why.”

No one doubts that Bush knows how to make decisions. The increasingly pertinent question is whether he knows how to make good ones.

--Michelle

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

18 Apr 2006 11:48 pm

The missing link

Oops. Sorry guys. Somehow managed to screw up the earlier link to Reihan. Try this. (Scroll down until you hit the "full-spectrum" item) Deepest apologies. --Michelle

18 Apr 2006 03:35 pm

Eeny, Meeny, Miney Mo

While I’m the first to agree with new White House C.O.S. Josh Bolten’s bold assertion yesterday that it’s time to “refresh and re-energize” the president’s top staff, I can’t help but suspect the Bushies will try to fudge their noisy reinvention pledge by making a handful of basically meaningless staff changes, like replacing Scooter Libby with David Addington. Almost certainly, the end is nigh for poor Treasury Secretary John Snow, perhaps the most pointless and serially humiliated senior member of this administration. But unless Rummy, Dick, or Karl is sent packing, I fear none of us should take all this talk about change too seriously. As much as I’d like to see Rove returned to the private sector, I vote for Rumsfeld.

--Michelle

18 Apr 2006 02:40 pm

Who will take care of grandpa?

I’m sure the point has been made before, but in her “My Time” column, (also in the Post’s “Health” section), Abigail Trafford makes a couple of interesting observations about immigration and America’s aging population.

--Michelle

18 Apr 2006 02:35 pm

Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from stress

Of all the weekly newspaper sections I slog through for work, my favorite may be the Tuesday “Health” pages in The Washington Post. One interesting tidbit today is a brief write-up of yet another faith-based medical study. This one purports to find a connection between weekly worship-service attendance and increased life expectancy. The author of the study, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physician who also happens to be an Episcopal priest, suggests that weekly worship may increase one’s life by 2 to 3 years. (As a point of comparison, cholesterol lowering drugs add 2.5. to 3.5. years).

This report comes on the heels of the recent high-profile prayer study, which found that having strangers pray for you doesn’t help, and may actually harm, your recovery from serious surgery. While on one level the studies’ findings seem contradictory, to me they appear to point in the same direction, at least secularly speaking. If you are devout enough in your faith to regularly haul your carcass to worship service every week, you most likely have a solid network of fellow worshippers to provide emotional support during life’s stressful times. (Isolated people tend to be less healthy than those with friends and family.) Moreover, you probably also enjoy some of the more nebulous psychological benefits of faith, such as the belief that even bad things happen for a purpose, that a higher power is looking after you, that life isn’t some cruel, random series of events totally beyond your control. Such emotional comfort helps to reduce stress levels, which in turn produce happier, healthier worshippers. By contrast, if in the wake of serious surgery you are told that a bunch of strangers have been assigned to pray for your speedy recovery, this seems like it could very well raise your stress level by increasing your expectations or making you feel somehow pressured to perform.

Non-spiritual message of both studies: God or no God, stress is a killer.

--Michelle

18 Apr 2006 02:32 pm

Now that you've finished those taxes

Democrats and Republicans alike should check out the always engaging Reihan Salam’s morning musings about the GOP’s need for a “full-spectrum dominance” approach to wooing voters. Even if you don’t agree (which I suspect Karl Embrace-the-Base Rove would not), it’s worth a read. But I wouldn’t try tackling it before that second cup of coffee.

--Michelle

18 Apr 2006 12:43 pm

Nuclear UnGoogling the Future

It’s been funny to hear the leader of Iran talking about his nation’s natural right to exploit the secrets of nuclear physics and join the global technological vanguard. His basic argument is “You can’t stop progress” even though stopping progress, I recall, is the great goal of his theocracy. Fundamentalist Islamic futurism? Can such a strange cultural particle exist, even for a half an instant in a cyclotron? Perhaps the man should speak more carefully, lest he unwittingly split the nucleus of the system he’s trying to hold together.

The Chinese regime, in its drive to ultra-modernize while simultaneously pushing back the Internet, is falling into paradox as well (with the paid collusion of Google and Yahoo, a few of whose brightest engineering minds have been challenged, one supposes, with the task of un-enriching the Web’s uranium into a stabler, safer element: gold). China, an upside-down version of Iran, is proclaiming the dangers of one type of progress while staking its fortunes on progress in general. Its rulers, like most rulers, have confused defending themselves with helping everyone else. I’d wager that many of them truly think that intellectual stagnation is the key to material forward motion.

These are the sort of internal contradictions that both Marxist dialecticians and Jeffersonian idealists are taught to regard as unsustainable. Nuclear medievalism. Know-nothing modernism. Managing such schizophrenic systems would seem to require an exhausting clamp-down that’s bound to produce, eventually, a revitalizing reformation. We assume that such projects’ illogic spells their doom. And we further assume that in the rational West (or whatever we’re calling our special realm these days that doesn’t sound too culturally arrogant but still conveys our sense of moral excellence) we need only to wait, well armed, until they fail.

But will we, as I fear in my darker moments, fail with them? Maybe our own grinding inner contradictions are as ruinous as theirs. Aside from the strident Biblical literalists who seek to purify a Constitution that they would never have been inclined to write, we believe in progress and we pursue it, too – and yet our liberalism feels at times like a high-interest loan from the idealogues. Blessed by fate with the oil we can’t stop drinking and endowed by history with the serf-classes whose products we can’t stop playing with, they take our bank notes and invest them in our bonds so that we can print more notes to hand them. To earn a few notes back and tip our trade imbalance less steeply their way, we sell them devices to suppress the liberty that commerce theoretically unleashes. Tanks and riot gear they can make themselves or obtain from fellow anti-democrats, but state-of-the-art self-hobbling search engines they have to buy from freedom-loving us.

Economists may see a synergy here. Others may detect a vortex. When the broad-minded grow used to living large by buying things on credit from the narrow-minded -- and then try to work off their mounting debts by servicing those narrow-minds -- the whole gang risks succumbing to dysfunction. McWorld? That sounds to cheerful. McPurgatory?

Which still may beat the other course: stepping back from the transactions, standing on first principles, and risking blowing one another up.

There’s a third way, I trust, and perhaps a fourth and fifth way. And I’m hoping that someone will explain them.

Soon.

--Walter

Monday, April 17, 2006

17 Apr 2006 07:43 pm

The public health menace of second-hand Twinkies

The war on fat has always struck me as well-intentioned but misguided--not to mention ultimately futile. A while back I did a longish piece about the crusade to make fat the new tobacco, but Slate's Will Saletan has boiled the issue down to its essence in today's Human Nature column (consistently one of the most entertaining non-Tom-and-Katie-related reads on the web).

--Michelle

17 Apr 2006 05:34 pm

The sound of silence

I may be spoiling for a fight, but I can't resist plugging my colleague Mike Crowley's wry ode to boredom in this week's tnr. BlackBerry addicts and IM obsessives are likely either to take serious offense or to break down weeping in total agreement.

--Michelle

17 Apr 2006 05:09 pm

Details aside, the underlying message

Details aside, the underlying message of Howie’s aforementioned piece is that even hyper-respectable White House reporters should think twice about judging Page 6’s Jared Paul Stern, lest they be accused of hypocrisy.

Ever noticed how nothing drives media types crazier than the thought of hypocrisy? Whether the charges are being leveled at one of our own or, more often, a politician, religious figure, or activist type, nothing send reporters into search-and-destroy mode faster than the h-word. Bill Bennet’s affinity for slot-machines, Clinton-impeachment-leader Henry Hyde’s extramarital affair, George W. Bush’s “young and foolish” years--the mere suspicion that a public figure hasn’t practiced what he’s preaching is enough to get him a media whoopin’ of the sort generally reserved for child molesters. (Let me go ahead and plead guilty to this myself, before anyone charges me with, well, you know.)

Since more often than not the targets in question are conservatives, some will be quick to blame the liberal bias of the media--meaning that left-leaning journalists are always on the lookout for ways to bring down values-hawking conservatives. I’ve always suspected the reason was less political and more psychologically tortured. For straight-news journalists in particular, there’s often a hesitance to look as though you’re passing judgment on behaviors that may be morally distasteful but aren’t technically illegal. (Liberal journalists, meanwhile, might be loath to violate the moral relativism often associated with lefty politics.) But if you can bust someone for acting in a way that contradicts their own stated (or implied) beliefs, then you can savage them for being a hypocrite without having to comment one way of the other on the original misbehavior. Since conservatives are the ones who tend to launch moral crusades in the first place, they're obviously the easier targets when it comes to hypocrisy.

A couple of years back, I did a column for tnr posing a related theory for why Democrat/liberal types seem to freak out over hypocrisy more than their conservative counterparts. One key difference: Social conservatives are too busy obsessing over far graver sins to spend too much energy worrying about hypocrisy. Then again, lately I’ve been inundated by emails from the RNC, GOPUSA, etc. shrieking about Democratic hypocrisy regarding the GOP's current ethics troubles. So it may be time to fine tune my theory.

--Michelle

17 Apr 2006 02:36 pm

Bob Woodward, blackmailer!

The hardest working man in journalism, Washington Post media reporter Howie Kurtz, has a piece today comparing the current New York Post Page Six blackmail scandal to the way political journalists operate: Be nice to sources who cooperate; make life difficult for those who don’t.

To illustrate his point, Howie cites a number of journalistic episodes/practices that have drawn criticism of late: Judy Miller’s serving as a mouthpiece for bad WMD info; White House reporters agreeing to secret, off-the-record chats with Bush; Bob Woodward acting as a stenographer for White House power players (Howie is, of course, more diplomatic in his characterization), and White House reporters occasionally writing positive stories to ingratiate themselves with key sources. (This last practice, of course, is hardly confined to White House scribblers; though Howie doesn’t mention it, the production of “beat sweeteners” is standard operating procedure for journalists assigned to a particular industry or area of government.)

In the broadest sense, I can see the parallel. (And before anyone asks, I don’t have much of a dog in this hunt. Coaxing sensitive tidbits out of reticent sources isn’t exactly in my wheelhouse.) Source reporting requires certain techniques and compromises that can carry a whiff of the dishonest and lend themselves to abuse—especially if the reporter in question is, say, an out-of-control megalomaniac like Miller. Even so, there seems to be a significant difference between the examples Howie cites--all of which involve reporters cutting either implicit or explicit deals with sources in exchange for info that (ostensibly) enables to the reporter to better do his or her job—and a reporter informing some billionaire that, unless he wants to have his personal life splashed all over the papers, he had better start fattening said reporter’s personal bank account.

Couple of caveats: Yes, in the cases Howie mentions, the reporters in question are also expecting to benefit  personally in the form of career advancement. But being personally ambitious is not an ethical no-no per se. Blackmail, by contrast, is. Also, there‚Äôs no question that some reporters get too close to sources and wind up getting snowed or use their cozy relationship with sources as a way to be lazy in their reporting. But those are examples of the way such reporting techniques can be corrupted, rather than indictments of the techniques themselves. Blackmail for personal financial gain, by contrast, is by definition a corrupt enterprise.

None of which is to suggest that the political media doesn’t have a lot to answer for of late--most notably letting itself get suckered into backing a lousy war. But unless, say, Timesman David Sanger is ginning up Iran hysteria because Dick Cheney has refused to buy him a new Maybach, the Page 6-political press parallels seem like a reach.

--Michelle

17 Apr 2006 11:06 am

Second Banana

Since I've never watched Commander-in-Chief, I don't understand why the show's ratings started high and have sunk lower, but perhaps part of the reason is that the prospect of a female president grows less novel the more one thinks about it. The potential Hillary Clinton administration that we began contemplating several years ago is, in my mind, already finished, done -- I've been picturing it for so long and handicapping its likelihood so incessantly that I've imagined it right out of existence and passed on to livelier futuristic scenarios starring more dynamic main characters. Ones with actual human features rather than poll-driven, mechanized expressions that digitally adjust themselves to three points plus or minus the margin of error.

But one question about Hillary's possible candidacy continues to interest me: who will her no-doubt-male running mate be, and what persona will he adopt? Al Gore was the somber younger brother to Bill Cinton's exuberant chosen son and Dick Cheney comes on as George W's tough, rich uncle, but what auxiliarly-yet-subordinate-seeming psycho-familial-sexual role will Hillary's partner play? He could play kid brother, too, I guess, and if he turns out to be John Edwards, he'll be able to play it convincingly. But such a duo might lack traditional gravitas. Maybe Hillary should choose a kind of doting, proud father figure-- not someone as old and daft as Senator Byrd, but along those general lines. Or she could cast her number two as the loyal, devoted, supportive mate that her real husband has never been but that every ambitious woman dreams of having. This might be a job for John Kerry. They could hug a lot, and then he could stand aside -- and down a step -- and nod and smile and give her the thumbs-up sign while she orates horizonward about her 'vision.'

Tricky business. Any suggestions?

--Walter

Sunday, April 16, 2006

16 Apr 2006 03:54 pm

And now for something completely different

My father has spent his entire career in the nuclear field—first in the Navy, then in nuclear power. He has long insisted that, despite what my lefty media colleagues might think, when environmental activists got serious about global warming they would concede that nuclear energy ain't all bad. I always thought he was nuts—not so much on the merits of his point as regarding his belief that any self-respecting green would embrace anything nuclear. Then comes today’s Washington Post opinion piece from Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. Apparently, Moore has been moving in this direction for quite some time. Looks like I owe Dad an apology.

--Michelle

16 Apr 2006 03:40 pm

My cup runneth over

Sorry about the late start. I spent the morning having my sweet, snuffly daughter checked out by her pediatrician. (Yes, the office has emergency hours even on Easter. I’m thinking of lobbying the Vatican to have the entire practice considered for sainthood.) Nothing addles the mind quite like an 8-month-old with a 103-degree fever. But with everyone either napping or in a chocolate-bunny-induced stupor, I wanted to share a few choice bits from the dozens of much-appreciated emails you all sent regarding faith, doubt, and parenthood. (Please excuse any formatting disasters, I'm working against the clock here.)

From Jordynne Olivia Lobo:

Your envy of the certitude of the believing and non-believing is, I think, misplaced. Having been an atheist who has since had her faith return--by the least expected and suprarational means: it found me--it seems that the atheist does not know certitude but imperfect belief insofar as his empiricism allows belief in the non-existence of the Almighty. Even the most resolute agnostic or atheist may not argue that Science Knows All, because he knows that Science--like its archaeological branch that binds you in thrall through its unearthing of hitherto unknown and lost scriptures--is constantly having to correct its own view of every phenonmenon. You will, I hope, give a listening to the Alison Krauss & Union Station song "Living Prayer" which, I feel, nicely captures the (and my) human experience of genuine faith (and genuine faith is always ingenuous), which is, I assure you, is not about and which has nothing to do with certitude.

John writes:

Certitude may be all right for angels, but we haven't made a great success of it. Too often it's an excuse for pounding on people who lack it, or who lack our particular brand of it. And it almost always means, "Stop thinking, everyone. We already have the answer. Anything more will just muddy the waters." And then you have to choose your friends very carefully, and your reading. Besides, two groups of people are often certain about contradictory things. For at least one group, certitude is a principle of error. Why envy that? Anyway, uncertainty gets a bit more bearable when I can stop thinking of it as a deficiency, or as something I need to get over, like a bad cold. I am finite, short-lived, and easily distracted; Reality—or whatever you call it—is not in my league. Even the small questions are maddening. Why does ice float on water? Yeah, yeah, the hydrogen atoms shift with respect to the oxygen. But why is that? It's certainly a good thing for us; we wouldn't be here otherwise. But why? Beats me. But it beats me in a way that keeps me coming back for more, and I can't say that about ingesting dogmas.

This from Andy Krauss and Ted McDermott:

As a couple of gay occasional Catholics with two kids in preschool, we’ve given a lot of thought to the matter of how, or what, to teach little ones about religion, the mysteries of the universe, Catholicism, etc. Needless to say, there are some things about official Catholic teaching that we consider utterly false that no child (or adult) should be subjected to. But there is also some helpful structure and simple answers to certain of life’s questions that the Catholic religion offers which have served us well in the past year or two. As to whether kids should receive any religious indoctrination at all from such an early age, just ask those parents who’ve raised their kids in a religious vacuum what it’s like to come home and find their kids bedrooms transformed into shrines to some awful spiritual cult. (Evangelical Christianism comes to mind.) We think it’s better to inoculate them early so that they don’t discover spirituality in a dangerous sort of way at an impressionable stage later in life. We hope it works for us!

I couldn't resist Geoff Arnold's superdiversity:

You want diversity, Michelle? Let me tell you about diversity: I was born to Church of England (i.e. Episcopal) parents in England, my mother adopted Catholicism when my father left (when I was 6); I became a hard-core atheist at age 15 (in 1965). I still am; I have an abiding interest in the philosophy of religion. (Read Antony Kenny and Dan Dennett!) My wife was born of American Lutheran and Episcopalian parents, went to Catholic and Quaker schools, spent 10 years as an agnostic "apatheist", then converted to Judaism. Our son experimented with Quakerism before settling on the Episcopal church; he's now (at age 32) enrolled in an Episcopal Seminary in California, where he lives with his wife. And my daughter keeps coming back to Wicca, but when she got engaged to a Boston Irish Catholic she went through all the processes to convert to Catholicism (including a stern homily be Cardinal "Paedophil-lover" Bernard Law). However both my daughter and her husband are so appalled by the intolerance of the Catholic church that they want their son (my first grandson) to have nothing to do with it! How did all this happen, how did we approach things? Open communication, no indoctrination, supporting the kids' questions and explorations. We all respect each other, even if we all disagree fundamentally about the nature of spirituality and the divine. And we all know when to keep our mouths shut!

From two unsigned missives. This:

As one who went from Roman Catholic to Pentacostal to Orthodox Christian, I understand disenchantment with religion and the draw of faith. I was taught that Orthodox meant “more strict” when it came to religion, but in practice I find the opposite to be true. Why? Because Orthodoxy is largely apophatic. It approaches the person of God from what we know we don’t know, rather than by asserting things about God which we can only guess about. So...Instead of teaching what must be true, you can explain what cannot be true and leave the rest to the kids. I’m often not sure what I believe about the world, but I’m really sure about two things: 1) My personal experience and 2) I don’t know what I don’t know. Seems simple, but we humans so often sentimentalize our experience to be much better, or worse, than reality. We also focus so much on what we think we know that we start to believe that we know more than we actually do...which is the mother of all assumptions. When it comes to faith, refusing to sentimentalize our history and keeping our eyes on what we don’t know protect against cultism and fanaticism.

And this:

As I see it, we all need code of belief to live in society and a set of core principle to dichotomize the universe into useful partitions. And there are different ways we can arrive at that code. Religion evolved to fill that need and serves a very useful purpose. Many people need ritual and liturgy to bind themselves to a community. The binding is important and how you get there is less important. Thus religion per se is not a problem. It's the illogical extrapolation of religious zealotry that is bad about religion. The tension between encouraging participation through faith and reigning in its excess is as old as the schism between protestants and catholics. In the end, people who can think for themselves are never a problem whether they believe or don't.

And finally, Chadrick123 writes:

There has been lots written about the journey of faith. Most of us spend our whole life in our quest for understanding. The journey out of faith is just as intense and just as long-lasting as any journey into it. Most of us who have been Christians in the past are always conflicted with the good we experienced alongside the bad. We finally come to terms and admit that we learned many beautiful and meaningful concepts about life, death and god, even though we reject the greater part of a previously held religious belief. Today, I do not call myself a Christian simply because I do not claim Jesus as a personal savior as that seems to be a defining requirement. But I still hold dear some wonderful concepts which can be correctly called Christian because they were taught to me in a Christian context. Life, at its best, is a journey. Teaching our children that at an early age seems important to me, more than teaching that they must believe one thing or another. I have far greater confidence in the people who admit there are lots of concepts they're uncertain of than I am those who are sure they've got it all nailed down. There's nothing to be ashamed of in admitting we're still in the process of learning and becoming. At 77 years I'm far more comfortable still being on the journey than I was as a brash young man convinced I had all the answers. Calling myself an agnostic is comfortable for me because I'm unwilling to declare that there is no god, as much as I'm not entirely convinced there is one.

Many thanks all. --Michelle