Who am I? Why am I here?

Change in blog address

2007-06-20T17:08:00.001-05:00

I just wanted to let you all know that I'm re-locating blog address's so I can use wordpress software to snazz up my blog and take advantage of some of their neat features that blogger unfortunately lacks. Check me out and bookmark me at http://elainemeyer.wordpress.com/.

Dan Seals is running in 2008

2007-06-20T13:47:00.000-05:00

Good news! Dan Seals, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Rep for the 10th District of Illinois, with whom I volunteered last summer, is challenging incumbent Mark Kirk again in 2008. He already has a primary opponent too: Jay Footlik, an advsier to the 2004 Kerry campaign. I would be wary of anyone who's reaching out to John Kerry for campaign advice, as Footlik has reportedly done.

Terms That Annoy Me

2007-06-19T19:22:00.000-05:00

And now for the annoying term of the day:

"power couple"

Usage: describes a successful and often pretty obnoxious husband and wife team
("husband and wife team" is another phrase which I hate)

Power couple examples that prove this to be true: Mary Matalin and James Carville, Lynne and Dick Cheney, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian

The term's high-intensity tenor is what gets me in particular. It's another one of those journalistic cliches that's often used in the context of politics or business to lend a snappy, knowing air to a piece.

Expressions in the power couple family: power lunch, business casual, power nap, heads down, suit up

The line blurs even more

2007-06-19T18:17:00.000-05:00

Hillary Clinton's takeoff on the "Sopranos" finale, with special guest Bill and special reference to Chelsea is just about the blurriest that the line has been drawn between celebrity and politics--at least since Ronald Reagan got elected into public office. Just watching it, I felt like the Clintons were a television family that I had grown up with more than public officials. The jab at Bill's eating habits just puts it over the top.

Is it bad that,
(1) This stunt makes me like Hillary a little better?
(2) I've started to enjoy the Journey song after this and the Sopranos finale?

Yes, I think it is.

Boost for journalism school

2007-06-17T08:38:00.001-05:00

I'm two years late on unearthing this, but for my purposes, it's okay:

The leaders of five of the nation's most prominent journalism programs are joining in a three-year, $6 million effort to try to elevate the standing of journalism in academia and find ways to prepare journalists better.

The unusual collaboration, which has been developing for three years, involves Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University; Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California; and Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Journalism school may be more useful than in the past, according to Berekley's dean:

While journalists have long debated the value of journalism schools, Mr. Schell, who did not attend journalism school, said he now thought such institutions were more vital than they might have been in the past.
"Things have changed substantially since we came up the journalistic food chain," he said. "As news cycles have gotten faster and more bottom-line driven, there has been less inclination and capacity in media outlets to train, mentor and guide upcoming generations."

I'll keep posting about my own investigation into journalism school. My first j-school visit is planned for the weekend of July 27th to Medill at Northwestern, my alma mater.

For the love of a non-scandal

2007-06-15T09:34:00.000-05:00

Why oh why are blogs and news outlets implying that Barack Obama is guilty of something for which there is no evidence? In the next wave of "air of scandal" reporting that enjoyed such a following during the Clinton administration, Obama is being unfairly linked to a guy under federal investigation. Wonkette today links to Wizbang politics, which does this very thing, quoting a New York Times article which itself offers no evidence of wrongdoing on Obama's part but makes something out of Obama's connection with this guy Rezko anyway:

Mr. Obama says he never did any favors for Mr. Rezko, who raised about $150,000 for his campaigns over the years and was once one of the most powerful men in Illinois. There is no sign that Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, did anything improper.

Wizbang argues that "this presents a problem for Obama" because "[a]nything which clouds his pure-as-the-driven-snow image can damage his campaign, since he doesn't have a resume of experience to tout and depends upon that image." They are wrong. Rezko only presents a problem for Obama if blogs like Wizbang decide to talk it up. Obama has been proven guilty of nothing. It seems, as I have said before, that people love to knock down those who they see as perfect, or as Wizbang puts it "fresh face[d]." If Obama were an unabashed wheeler and dealer, I'm sure he wouldn't be getting this treatment. George W. Bush never did.

How do people afford this city?

2007-06-13T14:35:00.000-05:00

In my new and unplanned blog series about how damn expensive life is, I explore D.C.'s cost-of-living and how increasingly unaffordable it is to live here on a non-profit or lower level government-worker's salary. I was reminded of this once again as I searched Craigslist for future housing options for the coming year. Considering that the once "cheap" and relatively well-located areas of the city like Columbia Heights are in the process of being uber-gentrified, it appears hope is lost for the automobile-lacking person who wants to live in a D.C. neighborhood that is in walking distance of a grocery store, Metro, and a few other commercial establishments that aren't liquor stores or Western Unions. The low-end of a 3 bedroom in Columbia Heights now appears to be 2800 per month or 933 per person, usually before utilities are added in.

Hypothetical: If I'm making $15 per hour at a non-profit working 8 hour days, five days a week, I make 2400 per month, before taxes, or 31.2 K per year. My D.C. income tax alone would be $400 per year plus an additional 6% of the excess income above 10,000, which in my case would be $139 per month. Federal income tax is 4,220 plus 25% of the amount over 30,650, which amounts to $4357.50 or 363.13 per month. Medicare and Social Security taxes are 199, by my calculations, so after taxes, I make 1837.87 per month. My health care premium might be around 60 per month (more if I have a "pre-existing condition"), so I'm down to 1777.87 per month. Now, subtract my 933 rent and a 50 utility check (add at least 25 more if I have cable), and I am left with 794.87. I have to eat, which we can approximate at around 250 per month and buy work clothes which maybe be around 60 per month. If I'm paying back 250 in student loans per month, I am now down to about 245, some of which I probably want to put into a retirement account (though it won't amount to the 10% of income that is recommended), the rest of which I should put in a cash reserves account. Keep in mind that Hill staffers often make significantly less than this hypothetical non-profit salary.

So the question is, why, in spite of the high cost-of-living and relatively low salary do young, aspiring public servants move to this city after graduation? I guess my reason was that it seemed like the most likely place to get the sort of occupation I've described and to meet other people with the same priorities, but often enough, people like me come to D.C. and get disconcerted that their peers aren't here for these noble reasons but rather to feed their own ambition. Members of this group are willing to stick out their financial necks to live in a city whose lackluster city services, absent mid-range dining and shopping scene, and pretty uniform group of professionals (i.e., lawyers and aspiring lawyers) can make it at times a trying place to live. Note to my peers: as long as we keep forking over our rent money (and I'm guilty like you), D.C. will continue to be increasingly unaffordable to people like us.

This flight from affordability is of course egged on by D.C.'s subscription to the standard mode of urban renewal today: gentrify, gentrify, gentrify. The luxury condos and shopping complex with the likes of a Target that have swept through Columbia Heights within the past year are a clear culprit for the recently increased rents; they're also the culprit for the continued lack of entreprenuerial character that D.C. maintains. Increasingly, D.C. has become a city for the very well-off, the young cash-strapped, and the long-time residents who seem to have fairly little say in any of this planning. Why I continue to live here, I don't know.

Adjustments

2007-06-11T23:13:00.000-05:00

One adjustments that I've endured going from collegiate to working stiff is coming to dislike things I used to like. Most notable right now is my palpable aversion to summer. What used to be the season of freedom and idling is now that of sweating and thirsting on the walk to work. When I had jobs and internships in Chicago between the school years, I started to feel a twitch of irritation at humid days, non-stimulating work assignments, long commutes, and early (for a college student) mornings. When this all becomes a consistent fact, it is even worse. Mind you, not morale crushing or dire, just a disappointment when recalling the way summer used to be. Especially here in D.C., where summers means a stultifying combination of work attire and ozone warnings, it becomes difficult to look forward to anything about the season ,save its end. Even in Chicago where it tends to get humid, Lake Michigan's unpredictable wind patterns can bring cool days, the kind that relieve you from the 80 and 90-degree days that are accompanied by glaring, cloudless sun that feels like it is an imperturbable spy following wherever you go. Summer is no longer a relief from school either now that I'm working full-time. It is just another season that blends in with the slow-moving quickness of all of the others in a working person's year. Seasons are no longer about events or milestones but about dressing for the weather.

Postcards from Utopia

2007-06-06T21:52:00.001-05:00

I just returned from San Francisco and am still revelling in the beauty of all of its sites. One thing I thought about while there is how San Francisco is one of several municipalities that is sometimes preceded with the jabbing moniker "the Peoples' Republic of..." Other places I've heard this prefix attached to are Alexandria, Virginia, the state of Massachusetts, and Evanston, Illinois. The truth is, all of these "Peoples' Republics "are pretty great places to live. While none of them are similar to the Communist states to which the phrase alludes, the policies that make these places seem more socialist or communist can't be too bad if they are such nice parts of the country to visit and live. Furthermore, a place like San Francisco is really a place of thriving entrepreneurialism, not only because it was one of the headquarters to the dot com explosion but also because it has the fewest amount of chain establishments one will find in just about any American city and a bevvy of competing small businesses in their stead. Without further ado, here are some photos from this aforementioned utopia:

(Photo credit: Steph Pituc)

(Photo credit: Steph)

Travel Lists

2007-06-05T19:27:00.000-05:00

After visiting SF, I will provide my current, top five global cities list (among the cities I've been to) along with some other travel lists:
1. Paris
2. San Francisco
3. Chicago
4. Rome
5. London

And the top 5 most scenic cites:
1. Salzburg
2. San Francisco
3. Florence
4. Paris
5. Geneva
Honorable mention: Washington D.C. and San Diego

And the top 5 best airports:
1. Chicago O'hare-United Terminal (reason: the neon lights in the moving walkway tunnel, the bevvy of good vendors, the brightness, the exciting people watching, a lot of vendors after the security checkpoint)
2. Detroit McNamara-Northwest Terminal (reason: state-of-the art monorail that shuttles back and and forth between this huge terminal, tons of vendors, sobering bright white interior, like O'hare there are a lot of vendors after the checkpoint)
3. Amsterdam Schipol (reason: like being on an Austin Power's set, lot of weird cafes)
4. Washington-Reagan National (reason: other than it being cumbersomely renamed after one of my least favorite American presidents, the main terminal is nice, airy, and bright with decent vendors and just about enough of them to pass the time before a flight. getting stuck here might be dull though, as it's not that big)
5. Portland (reason: lots of independent vendors and claims to have competitive prices)
Honorable Mention: Dulles for the terminals, though probably not for the security checkpoints and lines

Top 5 worst airports:
1. Paris Charles DeGaulle (reason: uncontrolled lines, long waits, few vendors, unnerving 60s spaceship interior)
2. Raleigh-Durham (reason: it doesn't help that I got stuck in this dull airport because of a cancelled flight with only a Cinnabon voucher to keep me enthused about the wait)
3. Zurich (reason: dull as all get out, and it doesn't help that I had to sleep on an uncomfortable airport chair there overnight with my grandparents)
4. Rome (not sure if it's Fiumicino or Ciampino) (reason: like being inside an 80s hotel lobby, pink and green with fake tropical feel is never a good interior design motif)
5. Boston Logan (reason: meh)
Honorable mention: Frankfurt (reason: haven't been here in awhile so it may look better now, but last i was there it was a mid-renovation madhouse!)

Do we want another self-anointed CEO president?

2007-06-04T12:05:00.000-05:00

The Times has a good article about Mitt Romney's career at Bain, the prestigious investment bank. The article implicitly questions Romney's claims that his business experience makes him a good candidate for president. Romney's business was the business of equity maximization where he exhibited not the skills of a traditional businessman--budgeting and attentive management--but the skills of an investment banker--salesmanship and presentation. Private sector candidates have a tendency to sell themselves as embodying every quality of a sharp businessman, but there are sharp businessmen in different industries, and the skills of a candidate like Romney should not be sold as the skills of a Bill Gates or Andrew Carnegie. Whether Romney's investment bank skillset are the prime qualities we want in a president is a question worth asking, one that should preclude his being labelled a businessman in the traditional sense, especially when his career has made him accustomed to fighting for the corporate good (profits)--

But Mr. Romney’s Bain career — a source of money and contacts that he has used to finance his Massachusetts campaigns and to leap ahead of his presidential rivals in early fund-raising — also exposes him to criticism that he enriched himself excessively, sometimes by cutting jobs to increase profits.
He made his money mainly through leveraged buyouts — essentially, mortgaging companies to take them over in the hope of reselling them at big profits in just a few years. It is a bare-knuckle form of investing that is in the spotlight because of the exploding profits of buyout giants like Bain, Blackstone and the Carlyle Group. In Washington, Congress is considering ending a legal quirk that lets fund managers escape much of the income tax on their earnings.

--and not for the public good.

The Silenced Majority

2007-06-02T21:56:00.000-05:00

I know I often conjecture about the disparity of concerns between the media and the American people, often without any evidence save the nagging sense that the D.C. media's preoccupation with reporting on the trivialities of political strategy has indirectly contributed to the series of giant pickles we now find ourselves facing as a nation. The Andrea Mitchells and Chris Matthews are the Neros of our time, fiddling as the world--in some cases literally--burns.

There was a great article in a Times blog about the disconnect between the Washington media and the general populace and it manifests itself every time a public figure is badgered to explain himself after criticizing Bush and his administration. As this Times piece points out, the recent upbraidal of Jimmy Carter seemed to be a case of D.C. media imposing cocktail party decorum:

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter's remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn't attack President Bush personally, but said that "as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," which can't really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken "an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president," and portrayed Carter's words - unfairly it seems- as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it "unprecedented." Yet as an article in this newspaper <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/washington/22carter.html> on Tuesday pointed out, "presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones."

This guy is absolutely right. I'm no presidential scholar, but I seem to recall reading many times of Teddy Roosevelt's vocieferous criticism of William Howard Taft's leadership. Anyway, getting in a tizzy over whether an ex-president criticizes a sitting president sanctions the office as a regal post where all former officeholders are loyal to the myth of the office, which runs counter to the fundmanetal tenets of this lower-case republican nation.

The recent acceding of the Democrats to the timetable-free Bush war funding bill is a prime example of the party being influenced by the popular though incorrect wisdom that their original war funding bill would be viewed as taking resources away from frontline troops. The writer offers a plausible exegis on the source of the Democrats dissonance and the resulting contrition it provokes on their part to the supremely unpopular Bush administration.

I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn't meet with enough criticism, and if that's partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think - when actually it often doesn't.

Psychologists coined the term "pluralistic ignorance" in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception - more a social than an individual phenomenon - to which even smart people might fall victim.
[...]
In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O'Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, "moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority." What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible.
[...]
Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/473/closeness-to-troops-boosts-support-for-war-but-not-by-much> , but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/washington/23cong.html> .

As the title suggests, there is as much a silent majority today as there was back when Nixon first uttered the powerful phrase at the height of the Vietnam War, but this majority is even more silenced by the D.C. media's insistence upon what concerns the "average American." If you've listened to members of the mainstream media over the years, the average American has not been too concerned with the Downing Street Memo, the Abramoff scandal, the Libby conviction, the U.S. Attorneys firings, ad infinitum. Using this logic, some members of the media fail to report on any of these incidents in a meaningful way and instead analyze the culpabilty of the players as a question of how well they spin their innocence. As a result, the media has shirked its duty to bring attention to the plagues to a democratic society--venality and autocracy--by claiming unjustifiably that the American people are too stupid to care.

In San Francisco

2007-06-02T01:22:00.000-05:00

I'm at my friend Steph's in San Francisco and have been up for almost 24-hours, though I did take some naps on the plane. My inclination when I visit new places is to make generalizations about the people who live there. When I walk into a coffee shop or store, I categorize everyone as a San Franciscan and view their actions as reflecting upon the vibe of their city. The crazy man who yelled at the clerk at Green Apple Books in Inner Richmond about how he "controls his own money" and "wants to be respected" (yeah, this guy was nuts--he was even carrying a rain stick!) is an emblem of the zany tendencies of some of the San Fran residents. The kind people who smiled at me when I moved my bags out of the way for them on the bus are imbued with a California calm that allows them to be much more considerate and thoughtful than the people out East. Today a car almost hit me making a right turn when I had the right of way, but rather than speeding through the turn or glaring at me, the driver actually waved apologetically. It's nice that people have some remorse for their unintended recklessness. Is this San Franciscan, though? Is speeding like a frazzled, over-caffeinated a-hole Distrcit of Columbian? Why is it so tempting to generalize about a locale, anyway?

Free and Alone

2007-05-29T10:03:00.000-05:00

Larissa Macfarquhar's recent profile of Barack Obama for the New Yorker is full of probing wisdom about the American Dream and its implications for Obama as he presents the story of himself and his family. Macfarquhar suggests that Obama tried through his early adult life to tread against his parents' inclinations--which are American inclinations--to wander in search of something better and instead sought to cultivate tradition and a sense of place. Indeed, Obama's first memoir Dreams from My Father has a Roots sensibility to it. Macfarquhar's description is unassumingly poignant. She writes:

[W]hen it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory.

Obama's decision to move to Chicago to become a community organizer itself seems to speak to the sort of longing for entrenchment that Macfarquhar describes. I found this all very interesting because for me, whether it is better to work on setting roots or to try and continually explore is a nagging question. It is easy to imagine exciting places and happenings from afar and to believe that somewhere else is better/more interesting/dazzling/full of smarter people than here, and it is a destructive generalization because it is unconfirmable and usually just leads to despair wherever one is. On the other hand, curiosity is difficult to quell--and for a reason. I admire Obama's thoughtfulness about his parents' lives though, as it reflects a wise maturity on his part:

“What strikes me most when I think about the story of my family,” Obama writes, “is a running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood.” Innocence is not, for him, a good quality, or even a redeeming excuse: it is not the opposite of guilt but the opposite of wisdom. In Obama’s description of his maternal grandfather, for instance, there is love but also contempt. “His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price,” Obama writes. “Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.”

It is a tricky thing, this balancing of freedom and rootedness, though the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. At the same time, the former tends to be the more glamorous route for a 20-something. The latter perhaps carries us further in the long run, but again, such approaches don't seem mutually exclusive to me.

Running on Reagan

2007-05-23T08:17:00.000-05:00

I haven't been paying too much attention to Presidential Campaign 2008--partially because I think it's far too early for the likes of debates and the already established tiering of the candidates, mostly because I have only so much time--but Frank Rich's recent pieces about Falwell and the Republican debate say a lot about the little that the Republican contenders have to offer. As Rich said, the Republicans seemed to be putting on their best Reagan impersonations the other night. Now that he is dead, Reagan's legacy goes beyond even the gratuitous naming of buildings, streets, and monuments in his honor: it extends to his deification by the right. For them, he is riding horses in the heavens in an open white shirt and frowining down upon Bush's deviation from his formula for Morning in America, which on closer glance does not look that different from what Bush has done this last 8 years.

Indeed, what no fan of Reagan seems ready to acknowledge is that Bush is extreme Reagan, Reagn taken to his logical end. Reagan made government bigger, he built up the defense budget, he cut taxes for the wealthier and ended up passing those on to the less wealthy in the form of Social Security tax hikes, he actively ignored the AIDS epidemic, and on and on. Bush has either done this or would do this if he could (can anyone imagine him acknowledging AIDS if he were president 25 years ago?). His policies have kowtowed even more to the social conservative part of his base than did Reagan's.

Yet, Reagan remains that elusive Republican ideal. As Rich said, the Republican candidates mentioned Reagan's name in the debates 19 times, while they only mentioned Bush's once. "Meanwhile," Rich concludes,

most of the pressing matters the public cares passionately about--Iraq, health care, the environment and energy independence--belong for now to the Democrats [...] You don't see Democrats changing the subject to JFK and FDR.

The cover of a recent news weekly asked who the country's new Truman would be. Maybe we need to stop looking for saviors from the past and start acknowledging that the problems faced because of all of the corruption and waste wrought by this current administration are pretty unique to our time and were wrought by forces that could have been prevented but were not, over and over again. If we had a Truman around, the prominent political commentators would have probably derided him for lacking experience or being too unrefined or too deferent or too overcompensating. When there have been people as good or better than Truman around (Al Gore, for instance), they've been derided. We're far past getting or deserving a Truman at this point, and what we really will need when this administration is done is someone with the energy of an FDR and the vision to realize the last thing we can affored to dwell in right now is nostalgic escapism.

Breaking down what we broadly refer to as feminism

2007-05-22T04:01:00.000-05:00

One of the greatest triumphs for a historian is to convincingly argue that a conventionally accepted account of a time period or event is incorrect or at the very least, simplistic. To realize that a common conception of the past is flawed or shallow is jolting and transformational. It revises how we analyze current problems and what we identify as their root causes.

Over the course of the last several years, I came to understand that my view of the 1960s and 1970s was formed by an overbroad paradigm: that during that short period of time, society and culture as a whole progressed. While I think certain events during the time period represented progress--women gaining admittance to college and pre-professional programs at greater rates, the end of state-enforced segregation--I realize that, as in so many eras, these are specific achievements that do not necessarily endorse other accomplishments of the time even if they lie within the same realm of "women's issues," achievements like the so-called sexual revolution. Nonetheless, people often conflate every achievement in the realm of women's issues into one great big movement towards Progress and Enlightenment. Others wholly vilify the entire era as the end of institutions' moral authority. I think that this recent era, like so many others, brought changes that should be examined free of these two opposing dialectics that so often hijack our conversation about them.

Take the women's movement and its legacies today. There is good and bad. The bad, in my opinion, is embodied by the "hook-up culture." I recently got into a pretty intense argument with some co-workers about whether such a culture exists and whether it is problematic. I think there have been some recent developments, the confluence of which make a hook-up culture more practicable than it would have been in the past. Here are a few: (relatively) easy and legal availability of birth control, a view that dating and going steady are the chaste activities of a bygone era, the equating of men's needs and women's needs, the trend of disassociating sex from emotion (and the idea that emotions are burdensome), to name a few. I'm not saying I find all of these developments problematic, but I think they are valid explanations for today's hook-up culture, a term which, when searched in google, yields a plethora of interesting articles and conversation; world like "perils" and "misery" immediately catch one's attention.

Of course, the bad always comes with the good, which means the sexual revolution should not be treated as a bogeyman, but it should not be treated as a natural outgrowth of feminism either. On the contrary, it can be vigorously debated without jeopardizing the achievements of women in other areas.

A good quote

2007-05-21T21:12:00.001-05:00

Just have to note this, if for no one else but myself:

A prime test of an historian’s skill is the extent to which he does justice to these complementary forces, repetition and novelty.

From this article, by Roger Kimball.

How do they afford it?

2007-05-21T08:57:00.000-05:00

Salon features a worthwhile interview today with One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding author Rebecca Mead on the subject of the modern wedding, now shaped by an entire industry of wedding apparel, wedding planning, wedding gift registry, honeymoons, etc. What I've heard anecdotally about weddings leads me to believe that they are incredibly pricey, time-consuming affairs to plan, and the Salon article confirms this. The average American wedding today costs $27,852. Even factoring in the dollar-value of all of the wedding gifts a couple receives, 28K must make a dent in the bank accounts of most Americans, who on average earn $46,326 a year.

All of this returns me to the question that nags American consumerism as it drives the sputtering engine of the U.S. economy: how do people afford all of this expense, and why do they submit themselves to this costly racket? What is the use in putting so much time, energy, and money into a one-day affair? I imagine some of it is driven by the impulse to keep up with the Joneses and some of it by the desire to have something to do in an age when consumerism is an ersatz hobby. Having weathered the same sort of excess for B nai Mitzvah, I don't look forward to witnessing the spending contest to which peers will submit as they plan the American wedding.

Aside from the nupital narcissim, I never understood how people could work up so much excitement over wedding dresses and floral arrangments. Being subject to protracted discussions about wedding details is painful, particularly for one who is not planning on getting married soon or has never been married, and therefore can find little relevance in conversation about beads, lace, and strapless vs. sleeveless or whether to get a custom made dress or go to Filene's Basement's annual wedding sale, or whatever else engagees find themselves obligated to discuss ad nauseum.

Finally, let's not forget the hefty expenses to which friends and family of brides and bridegrooms are subject, without question, in the form of gifts--for the wedding and the bridal shower-- traveling expenses, bachelor or bachelorette party expenses, and wedding wear. And why must there be an engagement ring and a wedding ring? Especially when engagement rings are a relatively new tradition--one-third of brides did not marry with an engagement ring in 1939--one egged on by jewlers and diamond advertisers.

The D.C. Public Library in all of its glory

2007-05-14T09:32:00.000-05:00

In doing a search on the D.C. Public Library's online catalog, I came across location categories including: Assumed lost, Claims lost, Branch closed until mid-February 2003, Gone Astray, Gone Astray between branches, Gone Astray for a Long Time, Lost, Lost and Paid for, Material Long Overdue, Missing titles Discovered in weeding, Undergoing repair, Unknown. As for the item category, my personal favorite category is: Brief titles entered on the fly. All of this makes a lot more sense if you visit the MLK main branch.

2007-05-11T06:49:00.000-05:00

An argument between letter writers on Salon has broken out over the question of whether college women who participate in a "Tennis Pros and Hos" party are revelling healthily in their sexuality or demeaning themselves. Many of the letter writers seem tethered to the paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s, namely, new feminism and hostility towards older generations.

One premise of the writers who found no problem with the "Hos" party that troubled me is the idea that women should not be subjected to double standard-fueled scorn for simply acting like men. This then inherently sanctions the behavior of men as the standard. I don't understand why it is such a problem for women not to act like men or not flaunt their sexuality for men (anyone who thinks "Girls Gone Wild" is a feminist exercise is deluded) and instead try and assert a new standard, one that does not conform to the hyper-sexualized media-driven absurdity of our current age.

Furthermore, those writers who place full faith in the judgement of 21-year olds and scorn the opinions of their parents are entirely possessed by the 60s/70s generation gap frame. They are jettisoning practical thinking, which is, why shouldn't a parent worry about their child, especially if she appears to be making poor decisions?

Writing dialogue is hard

2007-05-10T10:42:00.000-05:00

I've come to appreciate lately how difficult it is to write good dialogue. Despite how much we talk on a daily basis, somehow capturing the authenticity of conversation on paper is difficult, in part because the act of writing conversation is imbued with a purpose that conversation itself in its routine idleness and aimlessness does not possess.

In Thomas Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, his tome about modern-day debauchery at America's finest universities some of the dialogue borders on the implausible. The book has been criticized for depicting some characters as hopless cardboard figures, particularly the prep school alumni who are members of the most elite fraternities and sororities. This is debatable. What Wolfe most bitterly fails at, in my view, is depicting his more thoughtful characters. The intellectually curious students with whom Charlotte strikes up a rapport broadcast an unrealistic self-awareness to a point that seems utterly contrived. Take this conversation, where Adam Gellin, the student athlete tutor and college journalist who crushes on Charlotte, explains the M.O. of the intellectual members of his generation with dubious grandiloquence:

[...] Students like us used to just go to graduate school and become college teachers. But after that, a new type of intellectual comes on the scene: the bad ass. The bad-ass is sort of a rogue intellectual. A bad-ass doesn't want to do anything so boring and low-paid and like...codified...as teaching [...] You're an intellectual, but you want to operate on a higher level. This is a new millenium, and you want to be a member of the millenial aristocracy, which is a meritocracy, but an aristo-meritocracy.

Tom Wolfe: Are you serious???

Rosslyn: probably a lost cause

2007-05-06T13:12:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post reports today that the Arlington County Board approved construction of two high-rises in the Rosslyn neighborhood that, if built, will be the tallest in the Washington Metro area. According to the Post:

Arlington officials say they hope the project will transform Rosslyn, a commuter-clogged suburb crammed with outdated boxy buildings, into a modern development that would attract more tourism.

I would hardly call Rosslyn "commuter-clogged"--the area never seems that busy too me, but it is definitely an area that is home to few. "Outdated boxy buildings" is about as apt a description as any of the unremarkable cement edifices that make the view across the Potomac from Georgetown such an eyesore.

Still, it will be pretty difficult for two towers to change the character of this character-less part of the D.C.-area. The problem with Rosslyn, as with so many other parts of Northern Virginia, is that it lacks distinctive features and that street life mostly shuts down after 7. The designs of the highrises pictured in the Post article appear to deviate little from the dull steel and glass prototype that characterize today's urban towers. Just as the cement buildings of the 1950s-70s appear outdated now, the glass edifices will evoke anachronism a decade or two down the road.

The testimonial from a Rosslyn resident also seems incredibly misguided:

Roa Lynn of Rosslyn said she recently had lunch outside in Shirlington, "alfresco," she noted, and her neighborhood looked bleak in contrast.

"I was struck by how harsh and unpleasant the Rosslyn streetscape is," Lynn said. "I beg you please to approve this project today. Make my neighborhood as nice as the other neighborhoods in Arlington."

First, erecting highrises are hardly the formula for mitigating the harshness of a streetscape. Second, though Shirlington's small, pedestrian-friendly downtown area--all two blocks of it--is certainly more ideal than Rosslyn's, can't we set our sights a little higher than "other neigborhoods in Arlington?" Especially in regards to the businesses in some of these areas, particularly Ballston and Shirlington, which represent more of the same big box blandness that now infests so much of this nation.

Worst of all, this new highrise campaign will only encourage the use of the wholly unbefitting "Manhattan on the Potomac" slogan by Rosslyn business owners who clearly have never visited Manhattan. Ultimately, I remain pessimstic about a renaissance of Rosslyn, which seems condemened to the fate of providing residence to nine-to-five office workers, chain restaurants, Marriotts, and the closest Metro to Georgetown. Nevertheless, I wish this weird neighborhood to my East luck.

Mental Health in the Virginia Tech Shooting

2007-05-05T09:24:00.000-05:00

Much of what's been written about the Virginia Tech shooting has concerned the mental health of the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui and how the university might have done a better job detecting his illness and diffusing the massacre. What's lost when we upbraid the mental health treatment infrastructure is simply how hard it is to determine the inner thoughts of people. Sure, Cho should have received more treatment for his illness, but it would be unfortunate and counter-productive if the Virginia Tech massacre leads to increased suspicion by college campus authorities of anyone with a mental illness. As a recent Slate article put it:

[W]hat's more important is that thousands of students attend college who struggle with depression and other mental illnesses, and almost all of them hurt no one and deserve to stay there. Identifying the Cho-type exceptions before they explode is a matter of good campus police work and counseling, not harsh, interventionist crackdowns.

This is an argument for increased empahsis on gun control efforts, in my view. Controlling the supply of guns is much more straight-forward than trying to predict whether bio-chemical imbalances will lead one to commit violent acts. Even in this day and age, none of us can read another person's mind. It would be a shame if school authorities overreacted--thereby creating an even greater stigma around mental illness--while trying.

Tip your barista?

2007-05-04T09:13:00.000-05:00

I guess I can see this guy's point, but is he serious?

Jacob Grier, a barista at Baked and Wired in Washington, DC, and cowriter of the blog Smelling the Coffee, says he tries to tip a dollar per drink. “You tip a bartender if he creates a good rapport, so why not tip a barista for the same?”

Has anyone ever tipped their barista? I can assure you I haven't.

When ambition is overrated

2007-05-01T08:49:00.000-05:00

There's a nice article written by Michael Winerip in the New York Times of a couple days ago about his personal experience as an alumni interviewer for Harvard, whose admissions process he has witnessed over the years as it has become impossibly selective. According to Winerip, "[the] kids who don’t get into Harvard spend summers on schooners in Chesapeake Bay studying marine biology, building homes for the poor in Central America, touring Europe with all-star orchestras." Who does get into Harvard, one wonders. It certainly seems to help if one has a distinctive biography in an environment when even a title like editor of the school newspaper or valedictorian are run-of-the-mill. Of course, the students who have such unique opportunities available tend to be of well-off families who have a sophisticated understanding of the modern college application process.

It all makes me long for the days where everything after elementary school wasn't just one big effort to get into a selective college, where one didn't have to be so prepared, and where high school summers were a time for lazing and working a lowly job. Winerip says that during his summers, he "dug trenches for my local sewer department during the day, and sold hot dogs at Fenway Park at night." Though it is hardly at the level of researching for a NASA project, as one of his interviewees did, there is some merit to spending those hot summer days doing unglamorous grunt work. It sure makes one value their educational opportunities when one has to file papers all day or dig ditches, knowing that some people spend a lot longer than a summer in such jobs, and it punctures any sense of entitlement--that loathsome syndrome with which some Baby Boomers have imbued their children--that those who are less familiar with "a hard day's work" often feel.

As Winerip says of his own realization that seeing his children attain a Harvard degree (which they didn't) was not the end-all be-all achievement for him as a parent: "I came to understand that my own focus on Harvard was a matter of not sophistication but narrowness. I grew up in an unworldly blue-collar environment. Getting perfect grades and attending an elite college was one of the few ways up I could see." There is life beyond Harvard.

Giving myself and Eavsdrop D.C. shoutout

2007-04-30T21:01:00.000-05:00

I just remembered that I had submitted two quotes to the blog Eavesdrop DC, which charitably posts lines that D.C. residents hear in passing that are generally unintentionally funny. Mine were posted a little while ago, but I forgot to check back until now. Well, here they are:

But the grass would be so whiny!

Guy to Woman friend in line at Murky Coffee in Clarendon: The floor here is so chic. They must have been like, how can we make this floor look chic? Let's strip off all of the tile. It's so emo. Hey, you know what I want? Emo grass. That stuff cuts itself.

Labels: Clarendon

posted by EavesdropDC @ 11:51 AM 1 comments

Can’t get enough of your love, metro

Metrorail conductor with sensual Barry White-esque voice pulls his blue line train into Pentagon: "Pentagon."

Metrorail employee standing on platform: "Hey, you're sounding good."

Conductor: "Thanks, man. Keep it light."

--Pentagon Metro station

Labels: Metro

posted by EavesdropDC @ 9:57 AM 0 comments

Giving the North Shore a Bad Name

2007-04-28T16:47:00.000-05:00

Blasts from the past are fun, especially when they remind you why you don't really miss the past all that much. I just came across the Facebook groups for my old high school and for the area in which it resided, the North Shore. First, I just have to thank my lucky stars that Facebook was not around in high school. Not only would it have eaten up more of my time, but it would have probably disenchanted me greatly. Case in point: the group dedicated to the North Shore. The description of the group embodies everything that people critcize about the area. It exhibits a vaguely ironic self-awareness--vaguely. The student(s) who wrote the description are clearly aware of the uglier perceptions about the North Shore but only seek to perpetuate them, which is unfortunate, especially as they come off sounding disgustingly entitled.

The first part of the description is fine, if not a little too boastful. Having movies filmed in the area is cool, but it's hard to get that excited about Risky Business being one of the most noted. The only North Shore-located movie I can be proud of among the otherwise forgettable string of John Hughes flicks set there is Robert Redford's Ordinary People. I digress. Most objectionable in the North Shore Facebook group is the way the area's perceived affluence and exclusivity is trumpeted: "As one of the most affluent areas in the nation, we have just about everything you could ever want -- and probably more." Even worse, the location is listed as "(The Good Parts of) Evanston to Lake Forest, IL." Personally, I'd rather be associated with some of the "bad" parts of Evanston than some of the toniest parts of Lake Forest.

(It's also somewhat mendacious for these girls to say that the North Shore is 20 minutes away from Chicago. The southernmost point in Wilmette is 20 minutes from the northernmost point of Chicago if you're driving late at night or early in the morning. Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, and Lake Forest are all at least 45-minutes away).

The ironic thing is that these folks champion their New Trier educations but appear to have absored nothing from them. People who effectively take credit for living in an appealing locale or attending an outstanding school are incredibly dense, unless they built the Greenbay bike trail or teach at New Trier, or maintain the beaches on Lake Michigan, or something. Usually, people who harbor these inflated views of their lot tend to have difficulty transitioning into jobs and sometimes even college, because they are so used to the entitlement of their first 18-years. Too bad this government increasingly rewards unearned wealth.

Review: Death of a President

2007-04-27T00:25:00.000-05:00

Never has a movie filled me with such a feeling of dread as Death of a President, the chilling mockumentary that explores the morbid question of what would happen were George W. Bush assassinated. Splicing real footage together to depict the fatal assassination that follows a run-of-the-mill presidential appearance in front of business leaders in Chicago and the incredibly plausible reaction--an almost-immediate round-up of a suspect with a vague Al-Quaeda link who provides an excuse for new President Cheney (shudder) to go after dictatorship du jour Syria, the fortification and permanent passage of the Patriot Act, the idealization by political leaders of a late President Bush--Death of a President imparts the eeriness of living in a creeping surveillance state that is further egged on with each national tragedy.

Death of a President also paints a nuanced picture of the presidential assassin. The group of American presidential assassins and would-be assassins held idiosyncratic motives for their actions, almost invariably apart from the controversies of the day. In Death of a President, the most obvious suspect, the one whose motives so perfectly draw out the political issues of the day is immediately suspected, the unwitting victim of projection, in this case, of American society's need to bring feel-good closure to the war on terror.

The build-up to the assassination, featuring montages of a protest in Chicago's Loop with clips of a Bush speech on North Korea, is the least interesting sequence of this film. However, the denouement following the Bush assassination is gripping. Interviews with a Secret Service agent who bemoans the security hole that allows the assassination and with an overzealous but hesitant federal prosecutor seem realistic. The truth that eventually emerges about the assassination amounts to just the sort of tragedy caused by fighting in a war and untreated mental health conditions to which we are too accustomed. This one is definitely worth seeing.

Time to get back to gun control

2007-04-25T11:15:00.000-05:00

As usual, it takes an act of morbid, deranged violence to get this country talking about its lax gun laws, and even then gun advocates use such an event to illogically bolster their case. (How often does a potential gun violence victim's own possession of a gun actually diffuse an attempted murder, as the NRA suggests it would have at Virginia Tech?). Indeed, the Virginia Tech shootings once again brought home how porous our gun laws are in the United States. That this most fatal weapon is easier to access than other regulated products like prescription medication, which is only potentially harmful to the person who buys the drug, not to an unrelated party, is disgraceful.

A background check into Cho Seung-Hui would have classified him as a "prohibited purchaser" of guns under existing federal law, according to the Brady Campaign. Too bad 40% of gun sales are not subject to background checks, or that, in the case of Cho Seung-Hui's purchase of two guns, one which, "in virtually every other country," is only available to police key information like Cho's mental health history was not available to the gun vendor. Even the background checks are flawed. As a recent New York Times article revealed, only 17 of 50 U.S. states check whether a potential gun purchaser has been "adjudicated as a mental defective" or involuntarily committed to a mental health center. (Though Virginia is one of those 17 states, reports suggest it does not enforce this standard with much bite).

There are those who say, as a representative from the Virginia Gun Owners Coalition does in this article, that a deranged person will somehow be able to scrounge up a gun; however, there is no compelling reason to believe this would have been the case for Cho because he obtained both of his guns through perfectly legal means. Moreover, media reports on his personality reveal an introverted, reserved young man, not necessarily the type of person who would seek an assault weapon through illegal means. Also, even if Cho had attempted to purchased a gun illegally, there is a chance Virginia Tech officials could have intercepted it, especially if he did it via a school Internet connection.

As Salon suggested recently, the Virginia Tech tragedy is an unwelcome clarion call to the Democrats to make their way back to their mid-1990s support of gun control laws. The rationale that Democrats lost key swing states like Arkansas and Tennesee in the 2000 presidential election because Al Gore alienated the pro-gun vote bloc has always struck me as problematic. For one, gun control has generally been supported by Americans, especially those in the country's suburbs and cities, and especially in light of the abnormal amount of gun violence that occurs in this country as compared with almost every other country.

Secondly, one can play the swing voter opportunity cost game with any group of people. For instance, I could prognosticate that George W. Bush would have picked up the key swing state of Pennsylvania in 2004 if he had appealed to pro-choice women who otherwise had Republican sympathies, but Bush would be abandoning what is (unfortunately) a core Republican party principle if he were to try and court this swing group. Basically, groups of swing voters emerge from the woodwork when you look for them. After 2000, many Democrats--several of whom I generally respect, like Jim Webb and Howard Dean--wanted to believe that they had lost pro-gun voters who otherwise supported Democratic party policies. Taken to its logical end, this approach to vote-getting leads to abandonment of core principles and the reign of highly subjective analysis of a party's interest by strategists.

Nixon Culture

2007-04-22T21:46:00.000-05:00

Several books, a multitude of documentaries, one opera, and one college course later, my interest in late former President Richard Nixon does not wane. Neither, apparently, does the artistic community's. Last year I had the great luck to view a dress rehearsal of the widely-performed opera Nixon in China, which features an interesting, haunting, beautiful score. Nixon still stands out, in my opinion, as a rare tragicomic man in an era where leaders are seldom painted as momentous figures, and such a person is never more intriguingly explored than he is by a good artist (except maybe if explored by a good biographer).

Thus comes another installment in the saga of Nixon as art, the recently-New York debuted Frost/Nixon, depicting the series of interviews conducted by the British personality David Frost from 1977. I'm going to have to make a special trip to New York to see this one, not that it takes much to get me to New York, but the New York Times's review of the show, which is complete with a dramatic stage shot of a blown up, eerie Nixon bust--or what the Times reviewer Ben Brantley calls "some grotesque mythic creature in uncomfortable captivity"--is too tempting. Moreover, Frost/Nixon stars two acting greats, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen (aka the guy who always plays Tony Blair), who have both inhabited their share of political figures in performance roles, and it is written by Peter Morgan, screen author of last year's terrific examination of modern celebrity The Queen.

Still, I'm a little worried that Frost/Nixon will capture the Frost interviews with the easy knowingness of hindsight. It is tempting to view the build-up to such an event as if we already knew what was going to happen, and although from what I have read about the actual event, the Frost interviews were regarded as momentous by both sides, Frost did not seem to anticipate that he would have to trick Nixon into not evading answers, and Nixon did not seem to anticipate that Frost would treat the interviews as an opportunity to nail down the ex-president on the what did he know-when did he know chronology of Watergate. Unfortunately, the Times reviewer finds that Frost/Nixon indulges in hindsight bias:

Much of what happens behind the scenes, as Frost’s team prepares to take on the notoriously slippery Nixon, has an improbably naïve, college studentish air. (“Hey, guys, let’s put on a show to humiliate Tricky Dick.”)

And what a description of Langella's portrait of Nixon, which sounds like an apt incarantion of Nixon:

Throughout the production Mr. Langella’s Nixon has come across as a man of quick intellect, maudlin sentimentality, vulgar wit and studied social reflexes that have never acquired the semblance of natural grace. You are always aware of someone who struggles to conceal not only a defensive self-consciousness but also a cancerous anger and fear.

On another note, I've noticed in the last few years that there is an aching nostalgia for Nixon. Several scholars and observers of course have chronicled his progression, in the conventional historical view, from conservative lout to the last and most unappreciated New Deal/Great Society champion. Lest we forget, his penchant for invoking executive privilege to a constitutionally-endagering degree, which evokes a certain occupant of the White House whose tenure most of us have come to know and despise. Although Nixon himself may seem a more sympathetic figure than George W. Bush and the impact of Nixon's terms in office may not seem as bad as that of the Bush presidency--and the corruption of the current bunch is indeed unsurpassed--Nixon's lawlesness set the precedent for indiscriminate use of executive power. For that, we are foolish if we succumb to nostalgia--the simple belief that things were easier back then--and end up longing for another crook to replace the current one.

Advice, please

2007-04-20T11:33:00.000-05:00

Something I fear most is that my desires are oblivious to that great caveat that "the grass is always greener on the other side." More specifically, I am afraid I will jump into a career about which I know little because those careers about which I know a fair amount seem daunting and uninteresting. This, I guess, is the existential worry that hovers around my interest in attending graduate school in journalism: I understand the career in broad terms but am not familiar with the headache aspects of the field.

A very wise person recently wrote this to me: in life, "we must make important decisions despite the obvious lack of essential data" and that "[p]art of becoming an adult and establishing one's own identity has to do with getting more comfortable making decisions with insufficient data." I have often operated under the idea that few things, if any, can be resolved and few conclusions can be made, and what conclusions people do attempt to make are figments of their belief that answers exist. Recently though, I'm beginning to see how, even if I don't believe I can arrive at certainty on many questions, I must at least try to make decisions "despite the obvious lack of essential data," because the alternative, which is awaiting the right amount of information in order to make a decision, mainly just leads to ruminating and unproductive stasis.

Yet, I still seek data, of a sort. If anyone reading this has anything to say about the merits of a career in journalism, please speak. More broadly, if you can speak on the existential issue of how to figure out what to do for a living and how to avoid idealizing a lesser-known career path simply to escape the perceived monotonies of a greater-known one, please speak too. Or e-mail me.

Oh, and I guess I should say that I am interested in journalism for a few reasons, some of which might not actually make good reasons to go into the field:
(1) I like writing. Does this make me cut out for journalism, though? I don't know. After all, a lot of journalism is about unfurling an event, policy proposal, etc., and not about writing with creative flourish.
(2) I like editing and revising. I'm one of the few people I know who actually enjoys revising papers and articles. I figure this must cut me out for some sort of writing job.
(3) I am interested in a multitude of policy issues and issues in general but do not want to acquire specialized knowledge in one of them at the risk of knowing less about the others. I see journalism as a way to avoid the opportunity cost of specializing, because a journalist is a generalist who can, in theory, give a digestible account of anything.
(4) I often consider why certain issues are covered at the expense of others and what are the relevant facts in a story or the relevant aspects to be covered about a political campaign, and so forth. I figure I would have even more food for thought here if I became a journalist.

Piling on Obama

2007-04-10T05:31:00.000-05:00

Though there are those grumblers who claim the media reports on Barack Obama with obsequious adulation, I have always sensed that what little bit of a honeymoon Obama might enjoy would end as soon as the Heglian contrarianism of the talking heads set in. At last, Obama would be subject to the typical Washington D.C. establishment pettiness that plagues so much of political commentary today, where you are damned if you do, damned if you don't. Damned if you're a "Washington insider," damned if you're a "rookie." Damned if you're a consensus-builder, damned if you're a maverick (unless you're John McCain and not actually a maverick).

John Dickerson's analysis in Slate of a recent health care forum that Obama moderated in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, displays all of the typical pettiness of a gotcha journalist and none of the concern for getting to the substance of the forum. At the event, Dickerson says, Obama heard "one depressing story after another from people who had no insurance, bills that had bankrupted them, sudden losses of coverage, or only enough money to pay for the thinnest catastrophic policy." Welcome to our health care system, John Dickerson. It's pretty depressing, and yet such stories are all too common.

Less concerned with the hallowed substance of Obama's response, Dickerson instead goes on to concoct a thesis that if Obama puts on an informative demeanor, he runs the risk of appearing professorial. According to Dickerson, "we're not electing a president to run a seminar." This to me seems about as petty as it gets: Obama is merely listening to people, providing answers to them, and expressing general knowledge about health care issues. Dickerson continues, "That Obama has to hold [forums] to show he's serious only reminds voters that he doesn't have a lot of national political experience." Don't most presidential candidates hold these? I thought townhalls and their ilk were run-of-the-mill events for campaigners and public officals.

The article goes on to make some riveting conclusions, like that Obama's contributors must like him a whole bunch. Slate, here's an idea: take a day or three off from pop political reporting and try to provide your readers with a better picture of our failing health care system and what reforms are currently on the table to address it.

Book Review: Three Dollars

2007-04-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

I just finished this one today and wrote a review on goodreads that I will include here too.

This is one of the best novels I've read in a long time, possibly one of the best I've read. Australian writer Elliot Pearlman's Eddie Harnovey is a decent man living in increasingly bankrupt times (i.e., now). He and his wife Tanya are young, aspiring professionals who find their truth-seeking inclinations stymied by the corporatist, deregulating world around them. The seismic shift of priorities that Western governments, particularly English-speaking ones, embraced in the 80s in the name of imparting "personal responsibility" exacts the sort of devastating toll on hard-working, well-meaning people that those gung-ho Reaganite/Thatcherites purport is impossible, the toll of defaulted mortage payments, perennial unemployment and untreated medical conditions. The tale of such unmitigated despair is perversely readable, and much of that owes to the acuity and perspicasiouness of Pearlman's writing.

Pearlman gets so much right: office life ("Each day, I would say 'good morning' to the same people I said it to the day before. There were 'in' jokes about the standard of the coffee, the football tipping competition, or somebody's outrageous tie. Lunch was snatched hurriedly from the place next door, a little cafe where the regulars from the department jokes with the proprietor and his staff, small jokes, small business, small change, but these people were immensely important to each other. It might be that none of them were aware of their importance, each to the other, and it took me awhile to realize it myself but with each 'good morning' they were reminding each other, just slightly, who they were and that they were there" page 84), the transition into adulthood ([...] dinner parties had come upon us stealthily, imperceptibly, like winter and old age...[they] take hold of you like a virus and before too long you are a pregnant couple admiring vases and crystal decanters in shop windows and discounting the monetary cost of cnadlesticks because they are so lovely and because no one else will" p. 127), the strain differences in ideology and worldview can exact on friendships (see the arguments between Tanya and the couples' friend, Paul), the moral bankruptcy of modern institutions ("The universities seemed to her at the vanguard of society's unraveling. But I knew better because I was not there. They were not the first to retreat from what they had once stood for, they were not the first to turn their backs on any notion of common good and to prostiute themselves; they were not the first to promote a meaningless langauge designed to preserve their own pseudocultural and economic fiefdoms[...]But if the universities were not the first, neither were they the last" p. 248), the penchant au courant for seeing the world through the lens of silly corporatist platitudes ("The world was in the hands of animated self-parodies delivering Dale Carnegie wisodm to the bewildered mountain of their own banality." p. 293), among other things.

Pearlman masterfully weaves a story of conflict between people and their principles, especially as it comes out when young, educated people become professional and find that their careers drive them to embrace opposing values. We all need to justify ourselves and our priorities; often enough, such self-justification reaches a discomfiting cold-heartedness that frowns upon the behavior of friends in the name of adhering to one's principles.

My biggest criticism: I wondered whether the dialogue ascribed to the narrator as a child was realistic for someone that young.

Friends with Money

2007-04-08T16:35:00.001-05:00

Whatever you do, DON'T see this movie.

Ephemerality in Movies and Life

2007-04-07T12:00:00.000-05:00

One promise that D.C. residents make to transplants is that the spring and fall are beautiful and for those bursts of pink blossoms and golden leaves it is worth it to weather the stultifyingly humid summer and "cold" winter. Spring here is indeed beautiful but poignantly fleeting. Those famed cherry blossoms are here one minute, gone the next. I waded through the fallen flowers twice this week under the grove of those still attached to their trees and thought a bit about transience (while I wasn't busy ducking out of the way of family photos).

I finally saw Lost in Translation, which tells a story about transience. The relationship between Charlotte (Scarlett Johanssen) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is impossibly pure, the age discrepancy is almost an afterthought, because both characters are themselves fully aware of it, especially Bob. One of my favorite illustrations of this is the overhead shot of Bob lying stick straight on his back in his hotel bed while Charlotte is rolled over on her left shoulder, knees bent towards her stomach, facing in towards Bob. Yet, Charlotte and Bob go no further; their relationship remains innocent, a meeting of two people yearning for something that goes even beyond the other. In a way, Bob is just as much a model to Charlotte as he is a potential mate--especially as it becomes clear that their union is short-lived. He has navigated through the apathy that Charlotte presently faces and has appreciated those moments of meaning, as he reveals when he recounts the day his first child was born the "most terrifying day" of his life.

Lost in Translation to me had the feel of a mature rendition of the themes in The Graduate. Where in the latter, Dustin Hoffman's brilliantly-played Benjamin Braddock single-mindedly set out to win the affection of Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) so that it became an end in itself, Bob's sense of the transitory nature of affection hovers around his interactions with Charlotte. This is of course attributable to his age: he has seen his marriage harden from affection to indifference at best, coldness at worst. The iconic scene in The Graduate where Benjamin and Elaine flee her wedding ceremony and collapse on the bus, destination unknown, is the end of spring, the end of cherry blossoms--forgive this sap--but it is the end of romance and the realization of romanticization. To see hopefulness and plaintiveness so effortlessly merge in film is to experience the end of spring.

The Beltway Machine

2007-04-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

In an article last week on Salon, Glen Greenwald criticizes the media reaction to Barack Obama's partially-formed health care policy. As Greenwald says, the Democratic primaries are a year away, the general election a year and a half. There's no reason a candidate should be expected to have formed a health care policy yet. Worst of all, if a candidate is to aspire to the media's idea of "substance," s/he could easily forget that many people in the country more than anything yearn for a candidate who is not afraid to address our systemic and cultural problems and that it is those problems that have so driven our country down this bumpy treacherous path we find ourselves on today. Even Obama, who is able to take a step back from the conventional candidate playbook to articulate a broader message about the political culture has only scratched the surface of the systemic and cultural "corrosion," as Greenwald calls it. Obama's frequent rhetoric about D.C.'s noxious partisanship touches on a symptom of a culture of crassness, of 24-hour cable, of rapid response opposition research, and, let's face it, of the Republican effort over the last 25 years or so to intensely politicize governance, but it does not get to the heart of the issue.

Greenwald goes on to identify the true culprit behind a political dialogue that has often devolved in pettiness: the Washington or Beltway machine, which in fact some Democrats are as much a part of as some Republicans. At a certain point, job security, comfort, and status quo breed complicity in a broken system, one that holds public relations in higher regard than public service, and this is what I believe we are seeing in many of these Beltway veterans. As Greenwald puts it about Hillary Clinton, who is the most blatant Beltway Democrat running for president:

The people who are attached to the Clinton campaign and who will be swept back into power with her -- the Terry McAuliffes and Mike McCurrys and Howard Wolfsons and Chris Lehanes and James Carvilles -- are pure embodiments of the whole corrupt and principle-less and worthless edifice. They're the people who, both when they were in power and throughout the Bush presidency, sleazily fed at the trough and they believe in nothing. Cheap and deceitful cynicism is the nourishment which sustains them and, most of all, they love the Beltway power system and can't wait to resume their place in it -- fully preserved and unchanged.

Though I think the criticism heaped on Clinton regarding her seeming insincerity has been unfair in that it lends the impression that her rudderless pandering makes her unique, she is still the worst option among the Democrats because she is so heavily relying upon a machine that is no longer equipped--if it ever was--to solving the dire problems our country faces. Yet, this group, consisting of many of the people fluidly move between government and the private sector, taking top lobbying jobs after stints in public service, seek mainly to devise myths about "electability" ultimately exacting of their candidate adherence to the questionable wisdom of not sounding threatening or shrill.

In this vain, the New Yorker recently featured an excellent piece by David Owen about former Democratic party operatives who are working to manage the public image of Wal-Mart. As employees of one of the nation's top public relations firm, Edelman, these veterans of public service and political campaigns are now making it their agenda to promote the virtues of Wal-Mart. It's not surprising that the people profiled in this article, such as Greg St. Claire, a former Republican congressional staffer, and Fred Baldassaro, a former aide for the Democratic National Committee, are ideal employees to a public relations firm, especially on a project that has so many implications for policy making. Their connections and familiarity with the PR apparatus in D.C. are valuable to an ambitious PR operation like that of Wal-Mart.

The nonchalance of this partnership should not obscure its insidiousness, though. The Edelman campaign has no regard for grassroots efforts. Indeed, most despicable about the Walmart campaign is its reliance on "Astoturf" techniques, such as the sham organization, Working Families for Wal-Mart, actually a project of St. Claire's, the former Republican staffer. Rather than trying to actually shape Wal-Mart into the benevolent organization that Edelman claims it to be, they are merely spinning Wal-Mart's virtues as an employer. Take the case of Working Families for Wal-Mart:

Working Families for Wal-Mart, which paid for [St. Claire's] sister, Laura St. Claire, to travel across America in a recreational vehicle and keep a blog about visits with Wal-Mart employees. Everyone she talked to was delighted with Wal-Mart. At about the time that the trip came to an end, Business Week revealed that Wal-Mart had financed the journey.

It is amazing to me--and yet so emblematic of corporate values today--that Wal-Mart would rather shell out for an orchestrated PR campaign than use that money to actually improve the notoriously unpleasant working conditions and to raise the low wages of their employees, but such is the PR culture of today. The Beltway machine about which Greenwald laments--whether Democratic or Republican--is perfectly happy with the spin-to-win tactics of the executives the serve, whether these execs be private CEOS or public officials. If the last eight years has taught us anything, though, it is that accountability must be sought and that Herculean efforts to change the spin cycle rather than address serious problems have been to the detriment of effective government.

Paradigm shift or incremental change?

2007-04-03T10:06:00.000-05:00

One argument that has arisen among my co-workers and I lately addresses the issue of human behavior and how to get people to do things that are "good" for them. The resulting discussions have produced some rather daunting conclusions about our society, some which are controversial, others which have been long obvious but somewhat mind-bending when one tries to take a stab at how to change things. Namely, the inefficiency and waste of some modes of living, which is a large part of the problem with how we live today, as I see it, and will be the subject of my rant of the day, where I explore whether we should proceed to address our problems moderately with changes in zoning laws and regulations on greenhouse gas emissions or whether we should just start setting fire to McMansions (kidding, kidding!). What I mean to say is, does America need a cultural shift where our whole paradigm for success is redefined or at the very least moderated so that people don't feel they need to "live large"--which would involve some sort of attempt at trying to influence human behavior, or do we just need to chip away at the problems. Or both? How do "paradigm shifts" happen anyway?

I don't really know, so maybe I'll just rant for now about what went through my mind upon a recent visit through Farifax County. Some people use too many resources. The reason I hated Hollywood's collective global warming lecture at this year's Oscars is because the lifestyle of those privileged people of inconceivable wealth are much more consumptive than the rest of us. This culture is promoted to the rest of us by magazines, tabloids, and music videos that idealize big cars, fancy (though often gaudy) homes, and general profligate living. I don't know how to change that immediately unless some of what people value changes and some of what the media prioritizes changes. Daunting, right?

Furthermore, the ambitions of developers and automakers to ever-expand their business growth has hijacked policy making for many years. The resulting communities are by virtue of their design promoting wasteful habits, like driving to a nearby store that may only be a few blocks away because sidewalks don't exist and there are only arterial (not artillery) roads. Accompanying this sprawl is an aesthetic discordance, between the noise pollution of cars and trucks, the bland, gaudy excess of the homes, and that proliferation of one of the ugliest sights created by humanity--though today one of the most necessary: the parking lot.

A drive through parts of Fairfax County is case in point of the increasing decadence of many well-heeled people who build or buy sprawling mansions in gaudy Italianate, French Maison, or Georgian style. Not too far away at Mt. Vernon, the home of George Washington, one can marvel at the (relatively) small domicile of one of Virginia's then-wealthiest men. How did we go from that to this:

I don't know, perhaps I'm being too ~~aphoristic~~ didactic and condescending. I guess I just don't feel like I need twin Sub Zs, vacation homes, elaborate sculptures in my front yard, and 30 feet ceilings. (P.S., through "researching" this article, I came across a pretty funny website called LA Curbed, which has a McMansions archive that details the real estate listings in that most ostentatious part of the country).

Writer's Block

2007-04-03T08:18:00.000-05:00

To those of you out there constantly hitting your refresh button in anticipation of a new blog entry from me, I'm sorry I've been such a slacker. I've been feeling some writer's block lately, and I'm not even a writer. For some reason, I've not had as much to say about world and national events as I used to, I believe for a few reasons: (1) other people have expressed my thoughts very well (the Frank Riches, Paul Krugmans, and Glen Greenwalds of the world) (2) the opinions seem self-evident (3) I feel I don't have enough knowledge upon which to form a valid opinion. Perhaps I need to focus my energies on more local, conquerable issues, but this impasse does make me re-evaluate my interest in a writing or journalist career. What I like about journalism, though, is that there's little way around starting as a reporter as opposed to a columnist, and I think I need to know things--by virtue of being on a beat, or the like--before I analyze them.

Between W-2s and 1040s

2007-03-23T12:32:00.000-05:00

Someone I knew once said, upon closing on a condo, that she could not wrap her mind around having completed such an adult rite, as she still felt she was 17. Myself 18, I nonetheless knew exactly what she was talking about. While closing on anything seemed far off for me, college, the supposed transition between adolescence and adulthood, was right around the corner.

About six years later, I can say that I still have not shook that feeling my co-worker expressed then, that of being a young person pretending to do older people things, like buying furniture, putting money in a retirement account, and filing taxes. Filing taxes in particular gets at the crux of what I fear about adulthood: building an ever-more complex life. After all, this year, I really did not have many tax forms to deal with and much income to report. Woe to the day when I have to itemize deductions and report dependents, when I have to buy a file cabinet for my papers because my simple sectioned folder no longer suffices.

I think these thoughts too about other adult things. Buying a home, for instance, seems to catapult a person into a sea of forms called notes, titles, and deeds and a series of calculations about what to insure and for how much. I feel the more I have to insure, the more I will have sunken into adulthood, which in this modern world, seems to mean owning things and having stakes in things, in some ways, being less mobile. Right now, owning a bed seems a drag on me, what will I do when I own a whole house? How will I be able to pack it all, should I choose to move? Will I be able to get away with not having to consult the terms I have signed onto on a contract, as I have with my filed away lease on my apartment, or will I have to bone up on contract terminology in order to haggle with this or that person about his or that problem? Yeah, I think too far ahead for my own good, though it seems as if some of us are inching that way already, those who are buying condos or getting engaged, for instance.

I'm in no hurry to accumulate stuff, to own, to be settled. I figure that time will come, but still, in this first year out of college, such considerations suddenly don't seem so remote. That doesn't mean they need be impending.

Soporific Sex Magazines

2007-03-13T13:31:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to write about an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine which looks at the appearance of sex magazines at elite universities. I had a hard time believing that the subject was timely--such magazines have been notedby the media many times before. Moreover, the author, Alexandra Jacobs, seems to attribute a false ingenuity to the young sex magazine publishers. On the contrary, the magazines emanating from students at top universities like Harvard ("H-Bomb"), Vassar ("Squirm"), Columbia ("Outlet"), and University of Chicago ("Vita Excolatur") are emblematic of the larger cultural cult around being frank about sex. Straightforwardness about sex can be useful in a high school sex education class but becomes a bore when it masks as a source for entertainment or enlightenment, as it does in these pretentious periodicals.

Such magazines follow a larger trend, and in this sense, the college students putting them out are among the last to have boarded the bandwagon. This is why what they're doing is neither revaltory nor original but rather symptomatic of their inculcation from the entertainment media. My generation matriculated in an age where such inane mantras as "sex sells" became media gospel, begetting an ubiquity of sexual images and articles. Surely then, sex magazines at college are not original, as the coverage given to them would suggest, nor often are they very interesting.

In fact, sex columns and magazines are not necessarily interesting at all. While there are some subjects whose surface blandness belies their depth, sex to me seems the exact opposite: it is a subject that is initially salacious but quickly loses steam, probably because, when you get right down to it, there isn't really that much to write about. Think of all of the giggling high school students who greet sex ed with mocking anticipation at the beginning of the semester, only to yawn through human anatomy quizzes and contraception lectures a few weeks later. Some of the most popular subjects taken up by sex writers--sexual positions, sex toys, and porn--are those most lacking in actual breadth and depth. It's no wonder that so many sex columns devolve into cliches, with the predictably spicy writing styles of their authors overtaking the substance of the column, such as this explication of aphrodisiacs in the Northwestern student-published NU Comment.

Why then is the media breathlessly heralding the arrival of these magazines? According to the Boston Globe piece:

The public fascination with H Bomb clearly stems from the sense that there's not much of a place for sex at Harvard.

According to the NY Times Mag piece:

Considering that a smorgasbord of Internet porn is but a mouse click away for most college students, there’s something valiant, even quaint, about the attempt to organize and consider sex in a printed magazine.

That's a stretch. Such obsequious coverage of these magazines is evidence to me that Ivy Leagues truly do function as brand names. If a shoddy sex magazine has the word "Harvard" or "Columbia" on it, it suddenly becomes an inquisitive forum for reflection, even if its articles on the likes of the value of condom use at best serve the function of a sex education class.

I actually found myself agreeing with the National Review about the worthiness of such student endeavors:

Now, it’s one thing to engage in a bit of naughty publishing (on the university dime, at least) but quite another to do so and pretend that it’s something high-brow. You’ve read Ulysses? Maurice? Tropic of Cancer? Well, clearly now it’s time for something with saucy pictures! Pornographic modeling, once thought to be the exclusive realm of would-be actresses, sexual abuse victims, drug addicts, and other exploitable populations has clearly found a new pasture for flesh, with Ivies offering extracurricular careers (and funding!) to anyone interested in getting a head start in the sexual entertainment industry.

How to read a book

2007-03-08T20:16:00.000-05:00

In today's Salon, Tom Lutz writes about a rash of new books that examine how one should read a novel. These books are united by their authors' distaste for academe, for the college English departments that have built a jargon-laden, "ism"-oriented discourse that perverts the true value of reading literature. Lutz does not tolerate this analysis. He remains skeptical of the "new criticism" approach which the authors of the how-to books embrace. Founded in the 1940s (though surely not wholly original), new criticism focuses on the "close read" of a text and eschews consultation of extra-textual sources--particularly biography--to analyze literature. Lutz criticizes the writers of the how-to books for clinging steadfastly to the dogmas of new criticism in order to bolster their literary authority against the academic critics.

Lutz is certainly right that it is difficult to prescribe a method in which to read and not always interesting to read the prescriptions. The insistences of the how-to writers that a good reader engages only "the text itself" is also dubious. Like many theories about the irreducible, new criticism is initially alluring but is based on some false premises, namely, the idea that a text can be distilled to "the words on a page" and nothing more. Every reader comes to a book with different experiences and therefore will extract different things from the book regardless of the fact that the words themselves are the same. What's different is the person interpreting the words. An attempt to enforce a uniform reading of literature is precisely the wrong way to broaden and enhance literary discourse and enrichment.

On the other hand, the methods of new criticism do have much to offer. In my own experience, I gained much more as a reader using close read methods like analysis of metaphor, attention to diction (word choice) and syntax (sentence structure), discernment of tone, etc. than I did reading literary criticism. Close reading requires that the student actually support claims with text-based evidence, which forces him to go beyond the vague suppositions that are often thrown around when discussing literature. Comfort in supporting one's claims with evidence is eternally valuable and should be central to the teaching of English, a discipline which its students unfortunately often struggle to find useful, even though at its best, it upholds the valuable skill of strong communication. Use of the techniques of new criticism to read promote the development of this skill and need not be shunted off, especially if they are only to be replaced by Marxist, Freudian, or feminist critiques.

One last thing that Lutz scolds the how-to-read folks for: bemoaning the "glut" of books published. One writer, John Sutherland complains of the "world in which millions of books are dumped in the marketplace at once," which like Lutz, I hardly think a problem. Isn't the easy availability of books an encouraging sign of a literate culture? Would Sutherland be happy with the opposite, a world in which few books were published? Is it even possible for any society to so refine its manuscripts so that only the great books are published, as he seems to desire? I am comfortable with an argument that the publishing industry overhypes a small selection of books and simultaneously neglects some great literature, but that does not mean that fewer books should be published. Anyone who criticizes a book glut should himself question whether he need publish yet another how-to-read a book tract.

Oprah and a Lottery Culture

2007-03-05T09:06:00.000-05:00

Peter Birkenhead at Salon has an excellent article today about Oprah's enthusiastic campaign on behalf of a self-help book called The Secret, by Australian talk show host Rhonda Byrne. According to Birkenhead, The Secret is social darwinism preached with a treacly, new age spin. It espouses such wisdom as this: "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts." As Birkenhead says, Oprah's endorsement of this book calls into question her newest philanthropy project, the opening of an all girls school called the Leadership Academy in South Africa:

On the special, Oprah talked far more about what the school would do for the girls' self-esteem and material lives than what it would do for their intellects -- sometimes sounding as if she was reading directly from "The Secret." And in discussing what she was looking for in prospective students, she didn't talk about finding the next Eleanor Roosevelt or Sally Ride or Jane Smiley. Instead she used "Entertainment Tonight" language like "It Girl" to describe her ideal candidate. She praised the girls for their spirit, for how much they "shined" and "glowed," but never for their ideas or insights. Oprah puts a lot of energy and money into aesthetics -- on her show, in her magazine, at her school. The publishers of "The Secret" have learned well from their sponsor and are just as visually savvy.

Shouldn't we be grateful that Oprah is doing good, one might retort, what does it matter how she chooses to do it? The problem with Oprah's brand of altruism is two-pronged: it's fundamentally narcissitic, and it knows only lavishness--it is never applied in moderation. Oprah's shows are all about Oprah and her reactions. We need to find her jokes hilarious, think her life story a model, and sit in wait until she reveals who she's supporting for president. We need to awe at her beneficence as she showers her audience with big ticket gifts like cars and homes. I am compelled at this point to think of the Jewish scholar Maimonedes' eight levels of tzedakah, of giving, where the lowest levels are those where the recipient and giver both know each other's identities. Oprah never rises above the lowest levels. She requires that her beneficence be broadcast, that her identity be known to the beneficiary, that her imprint of luxury be made upon all that she gives.

As Birkenhead points out, her philantrhopy is unfailingly television-savvy:

Oprah's TV special about the Leadership Academy, essentially an hour long infomercial, was just as well-coiffed and "visuals"-heavy. In fact, when Oprah was choosing her students, her important criteria must have included their television interview skills. On-camera interviews with the girls were the centerpiece of the special, but as one spunky, telegenic candidate after another
beamed her smile at the camera, I couldn't help wondering how Joyce Carol Oates or Gertrude Stein or Madame Curie would have fared -- would they have "shined"
and "glowed," or more likely talked in non-sound-bite-friendly paragraphs and maybe even, God forbid, the sometimes "dark" tones of authentic people, and been
rejected. Sadly, the girls themselves (and who can blame them, desperate 12-year-olds trying to flatter their potential benefactor) parroted banal Oprah-isms, like "I want to be the best me I can be," and "Be a leader not a follower" and "Don't blend in, blend out," with smiley gusto.

This form of beneficence, in which the benefactor TV personality acts as savior to the destitute is lottery-style philanthropy. One must hope to win the attention of an Oprah to have his story aired on television and his life changed by a TV crew. "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," hosted by Trading Spaces' Ty Pennington is another television show that promotes the hosts' altruism and a win-the-lottery approach to life by lavishing a Sharper Image store's worth of the newest in home entertainment upon the homeowner. It seems that Oprah and Ty Pennington cannot bestow anything less than the best (or biggest) upon their beneficiary. As Birkenhead puts it:

One of Oprah's signature gimmicks has been giving stuff away to her audience ("giving" here means announcing the passing of stuff from corporate sponsors to audience members), most notably in a popular segment called "My Favorite Things." These bits have revealed an Oprah who truly revels in consumer culture, and who can seem astonishingly oblivious to the way most people live and what they can afford. She seems to celebrate every event and milestone with extravagant stuff, indeed to not know how to celebrate without it.

While one person or 350 young woman have won the lottery by winning Ty's or Oprah's fleeting interest, one wonders whether such abundance of resources could be spread out more evenly. While it's better that "Extreme Makeover" focus its energies on refurbishing a park hit by Hurricane Katrina and a soup kitchen hit by Hurricane Wilma than on revamping the home of a well-healed yuppy, it is worrisome that one has to hope for the attentions of a television show or else remain forgotten. After all, "Extreme Makeover"'s crew cannot possibly rehab all of the destitute areas of the country, every New Orleans or Appalachia or South Bronx, especially if it feels the need to include plasma televisions and Sub-zero refrigerators in each home. Nor can Oprah be expected to educate millions of children in Africa. In a society where people look to "Extreme Makeover" to do what this government cannot do, one has to hope to be one of the chosen few.

Cantankerous Conservatives

2007-03-03T14:07:00.000-05:00

The collective groan that conservatives let out towards the roster of GOP presidential candidates at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) evidences how truly indulged these people are. According to the Washington Post, none of the top three contenders--Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney--appealed to the rank-and-file and the establishment members of the conservative movement. It seems that none of them are "conservative" enough for CPAC. Instead, CPAC attendees are lining up behind one-isssue extremists, as in the case of a college sophomore from Michigan quoted in the article who is supporting anti-immigrant zealot Tom Tancredo of Colorado. That conservatives cannot even get behind more mainstream candidates Giuliani and Romney, who are themselves conservative, shows how much they have been indulged by the right-wing Bush administration. While Democrats in recent elections have increasingly coalesced behind the "most electable" primary candidate, loyal Republicans have backed the most dogmatic contender.

The best result that could come of conservative obstinacy is that Republicans fracture themselves, with the conservative base driving them to nominate an extreme candidate who cannot win in a general election. More likely, in my opinion is that the party will coalesce behind John McCain--or maybe Mitt Romney--whose conservative loyalties the right-wing will continue to exact. (McCain has already shown himself willing to abandon his past statements against this wing, such as his attempt to submerge his previously-expressed opinion that Jerry Falwell is an "agent of intolerance" by speaking at Falwell's own Liberty University). Right now, McCain wants to have it both ways: he wants to be a maverick and be the Conservatives' candidate. However, if the media does its job and the Democratic opposition does their's McCain's true colors as a political opportunist will be exposed.

Glen Greenwald makes a great point over at Salon on just how blatantly hypocritical are Republicans and members of the media who point to diffuse blog commenters as representative of liberal anger and hate and ignore the bile of blatant bigot Ann Coulter, who is a prominent fixture at CPAC. In a speech made there this past Friday, she called John Edwards a "faggot" and last year at the same event directed slurs at Arabs. As Greenwald says, the media has held Democrats responsible for anyone that makes an off-color remark on a blog while summarily ignoring the hatred and bigotry expressed by the Republican party's top brass:

But that's all fine. There are much more important topics to discuss -- like the anonymous commenters at Huffington Post and the bad words said by the bloggers hired for low-level positions by the Edwards campaign. Those are matters of the gravest importance meriting the most solemn condemnation and righteous outrage from all decent people. Those HuffPost commenters have uttered terrible thoughts, and that shows the anger, venom and hatred on the left, among liberals. It is cause for great alarm -- and for headlines.

But the single most prestigious political event for conservatives of the year is a place where conservatives go to hear Democrats called faggots, Arabs called ragheads, and Supreme Court justices labeled as deserving of murder -- not by anonymous, unidentifiable blog commenters, but by one of their most popular featured speakers.

As Greenwald says, the sanctimony of conservatives against liberal bloggers is disingenuous at best if they continue to give a pass to the fulminations of their own:

This is why I wrote so extensively about the Edwards blogger "scandal" and the Cheney comments "scandal." The people feigning upset over those matters are either active participants in, or passive aiders and abetters of, a political movement that, at its very core -- not at its fringes -- knowingly and continuously embraces the most wretched and obvious bigotry and bloodthirsty authoritarianism. They love Ann Coulter -- and therefore continue to make her a venerated part of their political events -- because she provides an outlet, a venting ground, for the twisted psychological impulses and truly hateful face that drives the entire pro-Bush, right-wing spectacle.

As Greenwald says, Coulter "is the face of what the hard-core Republican Party has become."

Bard pun, continued

2007-03-02T15:32:00.000-05:00

My favorite co-worker Ben-jammin'* (just kidding, other co-workers) is doing my work for me. No, not my real work but my blog work. He has spotted a pun related to D.C.'s Shakespeare Fest. Here it is, care of the Washington Post:

"The Shakespeare in Washington festival kicks off six months of no-holds bard. "

I think every editor must love articles about Shakespeare, because they are so easy to title. The bard lends itself to endless puns, none of them very good but all easily-conjured when they need to be, which for editors is probably in the wee hours. I haven't yet been to any Shakespeare in Washington events, which I feel kind of bad about, and I half suspect that I will not end up going to any of the events, either. First of all, I don't really know what Shakespeare play I want to see--my favorites of those I have read are King Lear and Love's Labour's Lost--but I don't have a burning desire to see either. I don't particularly want to see a Shakespeare play that I haven't read, because I usually feel I don't understand the play on just a cold viewing. I've also decided that since Shakespeare Fest is six-months long, surely I will be able to make it to at least one event. Because of its long duration, though, I have not made the effort to actually participate, comfortable with the fact that six months seems like a long time in my world, until suddenly it's June and I'm walking to work dripping with sweat and noticing that the last Shakespeare Fest event happened the night before.

*Benjammin' is not my original nickname for Ben. It is actually trademarked to Jake.

Ellen Degeneres is dreadful and other Oscar observations

2007-02-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

Some Oscar hosts get panned for not fitting in with the event. David Letterman, Chris Rock, and Jon Stewart come to mind. Last night's performance by Ellen Degeneres was so painful because she tried so hard to fit in, hamming it up with out and out bad jokes about the attendees and silly and desperate self-deprecation. In fact, she was at times just plain awkward. When she made a crack about the diversity of the award show's attendees, it felt as if Joe Biden were up on stage. The subsequent shot of a baffled-looking Steve Carrell said it all. A few other thoughts I had about last night's show:

Boy do I wish Al Gore had made an announcement to run for the presidency. The stunt with Leonardo DiCaprio was pretty clever, but it would have been a real Oscar moment if a candidate announcement had been made.
What is Jessica Biel doing at these awards? She was on "Seventh Heaven" like five years ago, right? Does that qualify one to present an Oscar? And she was in The Illusionist. Isn't that a poor man's Prestige?
Jennifer Hudson's and Martin Scorcese's acceptances were surprisingly touching. Both seemed genuinely humbled by receiving the award which evidences once again that people in Hollywood put a lot of stock into the Oscar, even though a look back at past winners shows some stunning wins and some ridiculous oversights. Take the year 1976 when Rocky--definitely a good movie--won over Taxi Driver and Network--two great movies. If I were a perennial Oscar loser, I would comfort myself by reviewing the unremarkable group of winners of Oscar's recent past, like Best Actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998 and Best Picture Forest Gump in 1994. The Academy is not very discerning, often perferring the heart-rending to the subtle and themselves swayed by politics as much as by a good performance.
Speaking of Martin Scorcese, don't Hollywood actors realize how disingenuous they sound when they lavish praise on a film impresario? By the end of the night, I'd lost count of how many times someone involved in The Departed said what they wouldn't do to work with Martin Scorcese. Scorcese's a fine director, but I think I heard someone offer to give away one of their lungs to work in a movie with him. Just once I'd like to hear someone say in public what I'm sure is said quietly at many an after party: "he hasn't made a good movie in years, and he's a jerk to work with."
A green Academy Awards ceremony with fuel efficient limos is the height of absurdity. Can an event so prodigious and decadent really be conservationist in spirit? Okay, maybe the lights are dimmed a little and the stretch Hummers are gone, but really, the Oscars. When Hollywood actors start lobbying for mass transit in L.A. (and using it themselves!) I'll be a little more convinced.

Goodreads.com

2007-02-24T18:23:00.000-05:00

Thanks to an inadvertent invite, I am now on Goodreads.com, a website that combines social networking with book reviewing. You can put up your own reviews of books, list books you are currently reading and those you want to read, and access your friends' reviews of books. It is a nice design, very easy to use, and definitely right up my alley. I am also reminded of the difficulty of reviewing books I have not read for awhile. I definitely have held some books as favorites that I have not read in years, so trying to express why I love(d) those books takes some serious jogging of the memory.

Can't we all just get along?

2007-02-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

It didn't take me long to be inspired to blog about something again. All it took was another netroots vs. centrist Democrat flamewar. In yesterday's Post, there's a front page article about the ongoing argument between well-known Democratic net activists like Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and the group Working for Us against Ellen Tauscher, a Democratic Rep. from California. I am not surprised that Tauscher is slightly put off by this campaign, because it has deliberately called her out as a centrist appeaser, but I can't blame them for doing so. After all, one thing I am constantly amazed at--amazed as in, I want to bang my head against a wall and yell Doh! a million times--is how frickin' quickly the Democrats will cede their battle even if they haven't nearly lost it. The majority of the country seems to be against a troop increase in Iraq, and no one save the very rich are satisfied with our current health care policy and economic situation, and yet the Democrats feel like they have to temper their every move with assurances that they won't move too far to the left. No one cares, guys! Just get stuff done, fercryinoutloud. I know it's hard. We have a media that wants the presidential election to happen tomorrow--not gonna lie, I wouldn't mind if it did--and the Republican party clearly wants to get nothing done unless it benefits rich people who are trying to pass their full estate along to their children, but in spite of this people want to see some results from Washington. No one benefits from the rhetoric of self-defeat except for Republicans, whose interests are very narrow. So please, Ellen Tauscher and the like, don't create a straw man "far left" to bolster yourself. It seems self-serving and disingenuous, and it helps no one.

A hodgepodge

2007-02-21T17:00:00.000-05:00

Lately, I have been wanting in subjects to blog about for various reasons, and because I cannot think of anything coherent to discuss but am smarting about a few things, I'll just jump around.

I finally finished Adam Langer's The Washington Story. It has nothing to do with Washington State or Washington, D.C., (I get enough of D.C. from living here and have little desire to read a novel set here at the moment). Rather, it is set during the time that Harold Washington was mayor of Chicago, from 1982 until 1987. I went back and forth on my opinion of this book throughout it. It is definitely one of the more personal books I've read, considering that the main character worked on her high school newspaper, is a young liberal-minded person, is reform Jewish, and lives in Rogers Park, a neighborhood in Chicago. While I never lived in Rogers Park, it is the nearest Chicago neighborhood to where I did grow up, and I know it fairly well. Other parts of Chicago play a role in the book too, particularly the near South side, which was apparently just beginning to become the fashionable neighborhood it is today in the late 80s.

The Washington Story became a little too zany at times, working off the impulse that many writers seem to have of linking all of a story's characters and their fates with one another. (Maybe such a tendency should be called the Crash syndrome, after the gimmicky Oscar-winner of last year, not to say The Washington Story was inspired by that glib movie). Nonetheless, I found the writing genuine and the sense of transience that Langer conveys about human desires and dreams to ring very true. Now that I'm through with it though, I need a new novel and hopefully one that is at least as compelling. Any suggestions?

In other news, my co-worker's blog has been put on the map by none other than the Food Network's Hungry Detective, a cop named Chris Cognac who sniffs around American cities for hearty meals. The Gourmet Piggy rips into the Food Network and in the process becomes the target of Cognac. Cognac's comments are unintentionally some of the most hilarious things ever ("I have a hot cuban wife and 2 kids that love me, so there..."). I love how the web connects people so easily--could this hilarity ever have ensued without the glorious "series of tubes" we (er..Ted Stevens) call the Internet?

Movie Review: Being There

2007-02-18T22:34:00.000-05:00

Do you ever know after the first few minutes that a movie you're watching is going to be one of your all time favorites? That's how I felt as I watched a mysterious but respectable looking man relaxed in a musty parlor of a traditional home, mesmerized by the images on a television, his origins and position in society initially an enigma. Peter Sellars is exceptional in his studied turn as this odd figure, soon revealed as Chance the gardener, a.k.a. Chauncey Gardner, in Hal Ashby's Being There. You will not believe that this man so inhabited the role of the fatuous Inspector Jacques Clouseau sixteen years earlier in the bubbly sixties comedy The Pink Panther.

I implore you not to read on if you are planning on seeing this film, because as with any good movie, the less you know going into it the better. Being There takes place in late 1970s Washington, D.C., which is comprised of two very distinct worlds: the gritty world (seen briefly) of the natural inhabitants of the city and the insular world of its well-off power brokers. Chance, who the audience is early on made to understand as a slow-witted gardener, bridges both of these worlds unwittingly and unintentionally, but the two social sets have very different interpretations of Chance. The more educated set is no more--and in fact less--perceptive as to this unlikely character's true nature. This becomes clear when Chance happens upon a prominent, ailing business man (Melvyn Douglas) and his socialite wife (Shirly MacLaine), who see metaphor in the fortuitous gardener's literal observations about the seasons, and thus feel they have unearthed a wise visionary and a sensual thinker, respectively. In Chance's pleasant interactions with these and other illuminati, including the President of the United States, we are presented a class of navel-gazers, people who see only what they want to. As a result, Chance becomes an natural conduit for their self-validation.

Yet, Chance is hardly written off. Being There is actually a tale of a fool more virtuous than any supposed wise man. Peter Sellars appears truly at peace in this role, so that Chance's simplicity radiates as a redemptive force in a complex, fallen world. As a reviewer on IMDB put it, Chance's inner tranquility is sought out by those who one would expect to be most aloof from such sincerity and such calm. Thus, Being There suggests that everyone, particuarly those with the most the world has to offer, longs for a simpler time, which is why Chance's uncomplicatedness is so alluring to the high ups. When he literally walks on water, Chance's iconically beatific existence has been cemented, as has Being There's place as a fascinating film.

D.C. Drivers, get a grip

2007-02-16T15:54:00.000-05:00

I have several gripes against the ethos of Washington D.C. and the rest of the "inside the beltway" territory, and underlying a lot of them is the prevailing Type A attitude of the people who live here. The Type A attitude is on display all the time: when commuters sprint to catch their Metro train during rush hour even though another one is two minutes behind it (running into fellow commuters in the process), when subway riders won't move to the center of the train car to make room for those behind them because they want to be close to the door, when people regard social functions as nothing more than an opportunity to "network," and worst and most fatally of all, when drivers disregard pedestrians merely because they are in a hurry.

I don't know if the bus driver who struck and killed two women who had the right of way at the intersection of 7th and Pennsylvania on Wednesday night was in a hurry, but the driving in this city is so abominable, so aggressive, so careless of pedestrians, so selfish, that this tragedy is not as surprising as it should be. Even today, two days later, as I crossed that same intersection, cars were still racing down Pennsylvania to make the light, broaching the tenuous transition between the yellow and red bulb with reckless nonchalance. Why drivers here are so wound-up is beyond me, because I think they would be happier people if they weren't, but D.C. police need to crack down on the insanity of offensive driving.

A House of Cards Market

2007-02-15T15:12:00.000-05:00

It's been unnerving to read about the recent troubles in the housing market, because it seems to conform in some respects to other bubbles we've seen and yet it is unlikely--just as with those other bubbles--that our society will derive any longterm lessons from these troubles. The housing market is beset by twin problems: less demand resulting in depreciating property values and inability on the part of homeowners, especially homeowners with bad credit histories and/or unsavory home loans, to pay down their mortgages. As with so many overheated markets of the past, the housing market, which I recall analysts declaring a solid investment a few years ago, has overextended itself. For this, Wall Street deserves a good amount of blame, as investment banks encouraged a market of loans for people with bad or "subprime" credit. These loans were often complex and ill-fitting for their holders. The problems of the subprime market seems to be gettng a good deal of attention in the business press but less attention in the general press, that is less attention as it relates to the average consumer.

This is a severe oversight, because many people are defaulting on their mortgages and facing foreclosures on their homes. Reporting on the economy tends to focus too much on the performance of stock indexes and too little on the economic well-being of most people. It also tends to only fleetingly acknowledge how the market impacts most people. In the case of a housing market, it looks like another new fad on Wall Street has proven dysfunctional and illusory as a steady investment. At a time when caution and some aversity to risk are undervalued--as seen in the (perhaps soon to end) overabundance of credit--it is a needed (though probably unlikely) change for bankers and analysts to think cautiously and realistically rather than impetuously and riskily about the nature of a good investment.

Music and Lyrics, but no plot

2007-02-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

I confess, I saw Music and Lyrics, starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Do not admonish me too much: I did not have to pay for it at least, as it was being screened in advance of the release date for free. (I think it is officially released on Valentine's Day, conveniently enough). Only my time and incredulity at the sheer badness of Hollywood scriptwriting were spent. I saw the movie in part because my memory of enjoying Hugh Grant had eclipsed my ability to detect that the movie itself looked pretty bad. However, it did not take too long into the film to grasp this. The plot is silly, one-dimensional, and poorly-developed, though probably because there is not much of a plot to develop. 'So?' you say, 'it's a romantic comedy, it doesn't need a strong plot.' I object. Any good movie has a plot that holds up, and there are romantic comedies that are good movies. Still, a strong plot is hard to achieve, and often, romantic comedies feel they can ignore plot considerations like consistency and development in favor of shoveling feel-goodness and sugary "wit" at the audience.

Particularly disappointing was Hugh Grant's role as the washed up 80s pop singer and resident wag. As has been pointed out often enough, Grant has two characters: the stammering, clever nice guy of his earlier movies and the cad of his later ones. Sometimes the latter role has bits of the former role in it, as in About a Boy, Six Weeks Notice, and Music and Lyrics. (Yes, I've seen too many Hugh Grant movies). In the latter two movies, the stammering cad has morphed a little into a resigned but delighted sell-out whose authenticity is only wrought out of him when he meets and consummates a relationship with an earthy, hippy-ish girl. The wardrobe of Barrymore's character symbolized the true extent of her hippy authenticity, however: apparently bohemian but clearly off the rack of Urban Outfitters.

The two meet at the perfect time: Grant needs to write a song for the most successful pop star of the moment, Cora Corman, and Barrymore, who appears at his apartment to substitute for his normal plant-waterer (yes, I'm not making that up), happens to be a wordsmith, happens to reveal this talent, and happens to be persuaded by Grant's character to write a song with him. The song is everything you would expect of a two-day endeavor, but it is asserted to the audience at every turn that it is a worthy number that will be bastardized by Cora Corman. The problem is, it's a terrible song. Just as last year's Stranger than Fiction averred that the book written by Emma Thompson's character which frames the film is poised to be a masterpiece, absent any evidence that there is anything remarkable about it, so too does Music and Lyrics assert something that isn't true, but rather only expedient for the plot.

And how about that plot? By about forty-five minutes into the film, Grant and Barrymore have already written their song. The movie still needs at least a half an hour more, so it is dragged out with a couple of "twists" (they're asked to write another verse of the song, Cora Corman turns the song into a weird sitar-and-belly-dancing act). A subplot involving Barrymore's character and a college professor with whom she had an affair and soon after became a muse for an unflattering piece of fiction based on their relationship adds to the mess. And of course, Drew Barrymore is very sweet, large eyes and all. In fact, her eyes are so large, they will swallow you. The best thing about Music and Lyrics is the take-off of a 1980s music video, and that comes at the way beginning, so, if you choose to blow money on this one, prepare for the movie to get progressively worse.

Ben Stein Congratulates Himself

2007-02-04T22:48:00.000-05:00

Recently, conservative commentator Ben Stein--perhaps most famous as the host of "Win Ben Stein's Money," and for countless "Celebrity Jeopardy" apperances, as well as stints with the government--penned an article about capitalsim, whose conclusion I agree with, but whose substance is completely disturbing in its unaware self-congratulation. My very wise and clever father offers an excellent take on Stein's "The Hard Rain that's Falling on Capitalism". First, here are excerpts of the article:

A FEW evenings ago, my wife and I were standing in the kitchen of our home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., feeding our voracious hounds, when a song came on the radio. It goes, “If only you believe in miracles, baby, so would I...”

Suddenly a flood of thoughts came into my head. I put on my swim trunks, and even though it was 42 degreesoutside, I got into my superheated pool and swam, looking up at the stars, and this is what I thought:

My whole life is a miracle so far. I live in glorious houses — tar-paper shacks by hedge fund standards, but plenty for me. I have a great American-made car. Above all, I have the most wonderful wife and the handsomest son on the planet.

My parents had a great, super life. They went from obscurity and lower-middle-class status in the Great Depression to fame and fortune in the postwar period. Their good fate was attributable mostly to their genius and hard work, but also to two culprits usually criticized in the media: President Richard M. Nixon, who made my father famous and powerful, and variable annuities, which made him and my mom well-to-do.

Thanks to Nixon’s appointing Pop as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and to TIAA-CREF selling Mom and Pop those annuities, their latter decades were happy and comfy. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am the honorary spokesman for the National Retirement Planning Coalition, one of whose many sponsors is the National Association for Variable Annuities.)

All of the miracles of our lives are because of America and our ancestors’ lucky, brilliant decision to move here from the desperation of Eastern Europe. All of it is thanks to the brave men and women who fought and died and bled on World War II battlefields like Anzio and Tarawa to keep us free, and to the
framers of the Constitution.

But it’s also thanks to capitalism. I realized this as I swam back and forth in my pool looking up at the stars and the contrails. Under capitalism, my grandparents, my parents and I could be paid the value of what we produced.

Their (our) income and position in life were (are) a function of what value we could add, not of the status of poor stateless Jews that we would have been in Europe.

Capitalism values people as individuals according to contract, as we lawyers and economists learn, not according to the status of our birth. This in itself is a miracle.

This miracle has been vibrant in the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans who have gone from nothing to something, thanks to the dynamics of capitalism. They have seen their pay rise and they have been able to convert their sweat and toil and creativity into capital by saving and investing in the stock market and becoming capitalists themselves — myself. [...]

But, as I swam and watched the private jets’ lights as they glided right above my head into Palm Springs International Airport, I had a chilling thought: in capitalism, the most fundamental building block is trust. [...]

When I see what the top dogs at all too many corporations are now doing to that trust, I feel queasy. Outrageous— yes, obscene — pay. Greedy backdating of stock options, which in my opinion is straight-up theft. Managers buying assets from their trustors, the stockholders, at pennies on the dollar, then forestalling competing bids with lockups and insane breakup fees. [...]

Empires come and go. Economic systems come and go. There is no heavenly guarantee that capitalism will last forever as we know it. [...]

If that trust disappears — if the system is no longer a system for the ordinary citizen but only for the tough guys— how much longer can the miracle last?

Now, here's Ronald Meyer's take:

Since I have time, I thought I'd write my editorial thoughts on the attached op-ed, sitting duck though it be.

Fresh from overindulging on munchies and California wine with his wife, Uncle Tzvi* Ben Stein counts his blessing while lapping his pool. The pool is heated, so he can indulge himself at the expense of atmospheric CO2 levels, though it is 42 degrees in his yard. His house in Rancho Mirage is a tar-paper shack compared to the houses of those whose taste matters. It seems that Ben's wife let him into the pool too soon after eating, because he isn't getting enough perfusion to the old noggin as he experiences rapture in the pool.

Not only is Uncle Tzvi's life a miracle, but so were his parents', thanks to Nixon having made Dad chairman of the council of economic advisers and thanks to the TIAA-CREF variable annuities that his parents had no choice but to buy as academics.

There are so many miracles, especially capitalism, which "paid [his forbears] the value of what they produced." Further miracle, "capitalism values people as individuals according to contract... not according to the status of our birth."

But Ben cramps up as he realizes that Capitalism™--the board game is not fun to play when others at the table are cheaters, such as those greedy CEO's.

As Ben seems to be suffering an attack of Republiopia (the ability to see only one side of an argument, and an in ill-informed side at that), here are a few mental status queries to test if Ben's frontal lobes can compensate for his defective visual cortex.

1. Could you turn down the heat on the outdoor pool, Ben, and swim at the local J? That should provide a few carbon credits to offset those cranked out by your Caddy.

2. That sagacious President who set your Dad up as chairman--could his and his vice-president's tax evasion violations have helped to set a bad example for later government and corporate leaders? Hmmmm? How about his Dick's disregard for any rules: could they have been bad for our political culture?

3. OK, so capitalism esteemed all of those Jewish immigrants. What was it that allowed only small numbers of them to enter large swaths of institutions of higher education or corporations because of Jewish quotas? And why did all of those silly lady garment workers and other unionists not at the time see how fairly valued they were? Perhaps the thermostat on their backyard pools was set too low, and their brains had frozen.

4. What percentage of Americans are lucky enough to be able to participate in TIAA-CREF, Uncle Tzvi, and how many are stuck with what they thought were their corporate pensions that the capitalists have devalued or stolen by declaring bankruptcy? How many are thankful that your capitalists' boob--er I mean boy--George was not able to convert the social security benefits into a capitalist's high-fee feeding frenzy?

5. Say, Ben, TIAA-CREF beneficiaries pay pretty low fees and their investments follow the performance of market indexes. Why are so many Americans fooled or forced into buying worse performance for much higher fees from the likes of anarchists such as Merrill-Lynch, Smith-Barney, Dreyfuss, etc? Oops, did I say "anarchists?" I guess they are actually capitalists, aren't they?

6. Finally, Ben, how many laps can you go with your head so far up your butt? Now that is a miracle.
_________________________
* An Uncle
Tzvi is a Jewish Uncle Tom.

I Love this Guy

2007-02-01T21:30:00.000-05:00

I have recently begun to avidly follow the column of Salon's Cary Tennis. Tennis has been in the job for awhile, but I think the tone and subjects of the column topics seem more relevant to me now that I have been catapulted out of college and into the so-called real world, where choices are not prescribed or easy. Tennis's column is a veritable display of the human condition: it features people who have pursued their dream and people who haven't, people who have been crushed by over-ambition and those who have been crushed by ennui. What it impacts upon me is that old saying that the grass always appears greener on the other side, a thought that actually can become somewhat freeing if one's life has been monopolized by investing so much in a future, in getting to that other side.

Tennis's effectiveness comes in his authenticity. He acknowledges that he hasn't figured it all out and lacks the condescension that is common among career advice givers which makes him far superior to the Ask Amys and Dr. Phils of this world. His writers tend to be very thoughtful people as well: what many among them seem to be looking for is someone who can reason with them--perhaps dispel as irrational their worst fears--without looking down upon them. He tends not to give straight advice but rather to expound on the writer's quandry with a mix of life experience and general reflectiveness. In yesterday's column, he responded to a creative writing student who, in pursuing her dream, had become fundamentally discouraged of her writing abilities and of her old definition of success. This is where Tennis's column becomes therapy--though hopefully not schadenfreude--for me: in seeing that others are also reckoning with past decisions and trying to make new ones and are feeling a little shaky and unsatisfied all the while. In all of this, it is so valuable that Tennis does not blithely and reliably say "follow your dream" on the one hand or "don't risk it" on the other, that he does not proffer a right answer. Instead, he talks about his experience. His answer to the paralyzed MFA student:

Thank you for writing. I am glad you are going to finish the program. No matter what you decide to do later, it is good to finish the program and get your degree.
I went to graduate school in creative writing as an egotistical person. I was concerned with whether people thought I was brilliant.
This brilliance was a brittle thing, a bright, cold shell I had made in junior high to wear to school and around town like a gown of dazzling and invisible power to keep predators at bay; it was a fast-thinking thing, a mean, clever thing, a way to stay aloft and aloof. I took it with me when I left home. I used it to not learn anything.
But you get older and defeat forces you to learn things you didn't think you needed to know, or didn't want to learn or didn't think were important, or thought were beneath you.
Here is the big main thing I learned: My writing is not here to support me. I am here to support my writing.
How it came about was I endured some failure as a writer trying to make money as a writer, and had to work at other things for five years. During that time I wrote but not for money. I wrote on the subway, alone, in a notebook, sitting by myself in the crowd. I wrote to save myself.
It turned out that writing to save myself was the best way to write. Here is why, I think: Our writing is the voice of a person who is innocent, powerless and in need of protection; our writing is the voice of a person who needs to be heard as he or she really is. It is deep stuff is what I mean. And shocking as it is to say, the person who is writing this -- the person I am today -- is the kind of person toward whom I once would have leveled pitiless scorn.

Restoring Urban Authenticity or Reincarnating Classism?

2007-01-31T10:22:00.000-05:00

High-class Parisians don’t want to come to the Champs-Élysées [...] It’s not prestigious; it’s not pleasant. The people who come are very common, very ordinary, very cheap. They come for a kebab sandwich and a five-euro T-shirt.

--Serge Ghnassia, owner of the fur shop Milady

If nothing else, the French are honest. The Times has an interesting if predictable article about a backlash embodied by the remark of this shop owner against the Champs-Élysées, the crowded boulevard between the Arc de Triomphe and Place de la Concorde in one of Paris's toniest districts. Like Chicago's Michigan Avenue or London's Oxford Street, Champs-Élysées attracts the rabble of tourists and commoners with its megastores and fast food restaurants, not to mention its central location to many Paris sites.

I can definitely get behind Paris's efforts to change the composition of the famous avenue, especially because its astronomic rents are only affordable to international chains; however, I don't think the more regarded Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré nearby merits high praise, as our blunt fur shop owner seems to suggest. After all, that smaller street is also mobbed on weekends, though its ridiculously decadent shops are only accessible to the richest of the rich (or those who are willing to go into massive debt for a thousand dollar handbag). So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Champs-Élysées is somewhat unpleasant nowadays and while it would be nice to see many more establishments unique to Paris on the boulevard, it will be no more special if it is dotted with high end boutiques--most of them chains as well. Developed societies need to get past this discourse that pits mass consumer goods against the high end, because it reeks of class snobbery and condescension and it avoids aspects of reality.

Underlying some of that resentment is that groups of young people descend on the Champs-Élysées from the working-class immigrant suburbs on weekend nights. The police keep a close watch on them, monitoring their moves.
But some old-timers praise the avenue as a sort of democratic — and free — tourist destination for the underprivileged. “The kids coming from the suburbs are coming from the suburbs to look, to see, to escape the places where they live,” [theater owner Jean-Jacques] Mr. Schpoliansky said. “We are a multiethnic country, and that reality is reflected on our street.”

Instead, the focus should be on preserving the charm and uniqueness of our cities while still constructively addressing the fact that globalization brings apparent benefits like lower priced goods, benefits that cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand by mocking upper-class interests. To some extent, Champs-Élysées has done this better than its counterparts in other cities, what with the tree-lined street; wide, pedestrian friendly walks, and upkeep of the historic buildings that house its stores.

Mediocrity's Poster Child

2007-01-29T22:03:00.000-05:00

I always kind of mentally roll my eyes when someone suggests that there should be an option on a ballot to vote for none of the listed candidates, but when the friendly driver of the Vamoose bus I took from New York back to D.C. last night gave us riders a choice of four movies to watch on the second leg of the trip, I saw where voting no confidence can seem to be the only way. Indeed, as we boarded the bus after a rest stop in Delaware, we were offered the following non-options:

Big Mama's House 2
National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation
Just Friends
Rush Hour 2

I wanted to laugh out loud or maybe cry at the wasted two hours I was about to endure. I voted for Just Friends, because it was the only movie of which I hadn't heard. Big mistake. First of all, as their names were flashed on screen, I realized I didn't know any of the actors, which is fine if a movie is trying to aspire to something but a really bad sign if it is merely aiming to be a romantic comedy. If a bunch of D-list actors are involved, you have yourself a D-list romantic comedy. I take that back: I recognized one name. Amy Smart. I somehow know who she is: I had seen her in that bad TV movie series "The Seventies" several years back as well as the movie Rat Race, which John rightly proclaims as having the worst movie ending of all time. The name of the lead man--Ryan Reynolds--was not particularly familiar to me though. Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Reynolds...sounds like I've heard the name perhaps but not instantly recognizable. Yeah, this movie's going to be bad, I thought.

Indeed, the opening scene presents an overweight man (fat suit, of course) sitting in a house in New Jersey in 1995. Fat suits never bode well for anything, especially comedy. The scene was kind of funny though because the heavy man, who turns out to be a high school senior about to profess his love to his best friend, is singing along to the song "I Swear" by All-4-One. I think my own memories of an overnight camp counselor who used to play "I Swear" every night right before our cabin went to bed made me laugh in recognition and appreication of this sad portrayal of being a teen in the 90s. It was all downhill from there, however, with the predictable effort at winning the viewer's sympathy through portraying the mean treatment of our fat protagonist at the hands of others paradoxically coupled with the script's own derision of him (he eats a lot, he is too sensitive, he cries, etc.). Heavy man then vows he will get revenge on all of the people who laughed at him in high school by being very successful. Okay, fine, that's a good enough story, even if it's been done a lot.

Ten years later, he is a Hollywood agent who can get any girl he wants. Fat suit gone, I recognize this man to be Ryan Reynolds, and I now realize I do know who Ryan Reynolds is. He's one of those people who you've seen in a few movies but is easily forgettable, and for good reason. Indeed, I feel a pang of longing for an earlier time when I could not put the name Ryan Reynolds to a face. There's nothing distinctive or interesting about him. He's not attractive, he's not a good actor, and, this lead part in Just Friends is probably the best role he's capable of. He was in "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place." He's a poor man's Paul Walker. [I later recalled that he had a small part in the movie Dick, which I do enjoy, though no thanks to Ryan Reynolds (his part could have been played by a lot of people).] Here are a few actors I equate with Ryan Reynolds, in terms of sheer badness: Jerry O'Connell, Matthew Lawrence, and Seann William Scott. Here's a guy whose biggest aspiration is probably to be in a sequel to Old School. Ryan Reynolds is the Nickelback of movies.

As good as I thought the Vamoose bus ride was, I just have to wonder why they have such an awful stock of movies (the movie that was shown first was RV). And yet, I must also say, there is something elegant about the mediocrity personified by Ryan Reynolds, because if you ever want to illustrate the thorough unremarkable, uninspired, forgettable nature of something, just say two words: Ryan Reynolds.

The Politico, a review

2007-01-24T22:32:00.000-05:00

I subjected D.C.'s newest periodical to a harsh criticism a couple of weeks ago, though I heldout the possibility that my scorn was undeserved. Don't worry, it pretty much wasn't. The Politico is the typical, out-of-touch, superfluous D.C. rag that I've become used to. Why we need another one, I don't know, but The Politco's columns include a representative sampling of all of the usual pundit pet causes and analyses: wouldn't it be great to see a bipartisan presidential ticket in '08? (never going to happen, shouldn't happen, and Joe Lieberman and John McCain is hardly bipartisan), a fruitless debate between some guy from the CATO Institute and someone else about whether the West is becoming more libertarian or more liberal, and a fluff piece about 2008 potential candidates' websites.

Politico isn't a lost cause. If nothing else, their inside Congress reporting is useful, because it brings up practical considerations about members of Congress that aren't often raised. An article about the aged Congress ,which looks at the variety of age-related health problems of our elected officials, raises the question of whether a person with chronic health issues can adequately serve:

[S]uggestions that an enfeebled senator consider retirement haven't been broached, even considering the distressing example of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., who spent the final year of his term, at age 100, in and out of Walter Reed Army Medical Center here.

Politico's coverage of lobbyists is also useful, because, as much as we might like to forget it, they are an integral and yet relatively little-publicized part of the policy process. The local beat is the natural terrain of a magazine like Politico, and it should stick to that rather than engage in the type of useless speculation that permeates like oxygen throughout this city.

Are Americans ready for a black or woman president?

2007-01-22T21:06:00.000-05:00

This is a question that is raised whenever the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is reported or discussed. I don't think it leads to an especially useful conversation, or at least, not in its current incarnations. This is because the conversation can be very speculative. It is often asserted that Americans harbor too much latent racism to elect a black, and a little less often, that Americans hold too rigid a definition of gender roles to elect a woman. My sense has always been that Americans today would elect a black or a woman because we are accustomed to them/us in most facets of our society, but I am by no means an authority on public opinion. I don't think many people are authorities, which is why I wonder whether this conversation can be useful. After all, if we decide that Americans, most of whom none of us know, are not ready for a non-white, non-male president, then we implicitly discourage the Obama or Clinton candidacies because "the time is not right." Even though we are ready for a black or a woman, they are not.

However, historical change, and especially change in favor of inclusiveness, must be pushed. Rosa Parks did not wait until the time seemed right to sit in the front of a segregated bus, and black students didn't wait until the time was right to enroll in U. of Mississippi. Neither Clinton nor Obama face the institutionalized discrimination of these earlier cases. Why then should we try to hinder their candidacies with unfounded speculations about what Americans are ready for? The best thing anyone who hopes that America is ready for a black or a woman or anyone of any race, religion, or ethnicity can do is to take that person as a candidate first and forgo the sheer speculation that often comes with attempting to diagnose our country's level of prejudice.

Is there a difference between Chinatown bus services?

2007-01-21T21:33:00.000-05:00

Can anyone who has more experience riding one of the several bus services that start at a Chinatown in one city and end in another tell me if one is decisively better. I have only taken New Century Travel. I first took it to Philadelphia, as it was one of two bus services that go there and the only one that had a schedule amenable to my own. It was very prompt (actually, it even left early!); however, the time that the bus left was such that we were delayed by an hour and a half or so because of awful D.C. rush hour traffic. The bus ride from Philadelphia back to D.C. was on a Sunday afternoon and encountered no problems. When I went to New York a couple months later, I stuck with New Century Travel, because of my positive first experience. However, the bus was about an hour and a half late arriving into D.C., making me an hour and a half or so late to New York. (At least the outbound rush hour traffic wasn't so bad, though).

In anticipation of my next trip to New York, I might even avoid the Chinatown bus quandry altogether. I am planning to take Vamoose! back from New York because it lets passengers off right near where I live. The website is nicer than those of the various Chinatown bus services as well, which gives me (a perhaps false) sense of faith in their timeliness and general safety. However, if I leave after work on Thursday, I will have to take the Chinatown bus, because it leaves not far from my office. My question is, do I stick with New Century Travel and risk delay (or risk a more unpleasant experience, as happened to one of my coworkers, who got stuck on a New Century bus that was overheated and had a broken toilet), or is there another more reliable Chinatown bus service?

Same Party; Different Political Orientations

2007-01-20T18:00:00.000-05:00

I was reading the Wikipedia article "Culture of the United States" to try to summon an idea of what on earth I would say if I were to respond to a request for a freelance article about American culture for a magazine targeted at international students. I probably won't actually write such an article, because I find culture, especially one's own culture pretty difficult to portray. However, I will impart what I find distinct about American political culture, which has lately been framed as urban vs. rural and less to do with difference between the regions of the United States.

I used to think that the former embodied the main polarity between political perspectives. Yet, from living in D.C., I am discovering that regional distinction is still relevant. Thus, West Coast Democrats are different from Midwestern Democrats are different from East Coast Democrats. I think East Coast politics values the establishment opinion. It tends to emphasize what experts are saying. It is risk-averse and in recent history is best embodied by an entity like the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. To me, East Coast politics--whether Democratic or Republican--is pretty frustrating and more elitist than I would have earlier liked to believe. It is probably makred by more cynicism than anywhere I've been, even though in other parts of the country, there is certainly fair distrust of Washington at all times. Here on the East, though, and maybe especially in Washington, people can easily fall into the trap of making a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the view that ideals are alien to politics. On the other hand, Midwestern politics tends to invoke the more hopeful tenets of democracy--participation, informed citizenry, a faith in the American dream or at least in rehabilitating it. From what I can tell of West Coast politics, it values the novel, innovative, and pioneering. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plans to make California a beacon of energy efficiency and universal healthcare. Neither has happened yet (they are proposals at the moment), but both aspirations are often discarded as too impractical by the powers that be. Western politics values similar things but may have a bit more of a libertarian character. My thesis about regions has its limits, certainly. Massachusetts has already instated a universal healthcare provision, and it of course, sits on the East, not the West Coast.

As you can see, I'm a bit disenchanted with the way things work in D.C. With so many experts, think tanks, issue advocacy groups, and lobbying firms headquartered in one place, often far away from the actual people they represent or claim to represent, it is easy to see how those "inside the Beltway" become aloof and in some respects is an argument for vigorous federalism.

Certain movies

2007-01-15T22:37:00.000-05:00

...are overrated. I just tried to watch Last Tango in Paris, a movie that is yet more proof that unconventionality and shock for its own sake make for an unsatisfying story. Director Bernardo Bertolucci, who also made the horrendous Dreamers, is often held up as one of the best directors of film. He is certainly talented at filming, though Last Tango didn't distinguish itself markedly from the general look of its time period, which tended towards the gritty and somewhat barren. The movie is filmed in Paris, but we don't see Les Grands Boulevards, Notre Dame, or Boulveard St-Germain, or at least, we don't before the point at which I threw my hands up in despair and turned off my DVD player. Instead, Bertolucci gives us what appears to be the 14th or 15th Arrondissement, where the Metro is elevated and the streetlife is lacking. In this world, Last Tango in Paris portrays the chance meeting of an American expatriate (Marlon Brando, who looks pretty attractive and relatively slim), and a French woman. The two begin a sexual relationship that Brando insists must have no connection to anything outside of the pleasure to be derived from such a liaison. The NC-17 rating of course means that the viewer is party to the tryst, whose scenes occupy way too much of the film's otherwise tolerable--though not great--sequences. Bertolucci has a knack for grappling with the taboo, but do incest and improbable sexual relationships really need to be treated? Do we really need to see, for instance, brother and sister engaging in incest in Dreamers, multiple times? At the very least, the determined, gratuitous exposure of such practices reveal a poverty of imagination. Anyway, on top of my disappointment with what Jean-Luc Goddard films I've seen--don't worry, I haven't given up--I cannot say I am too impressed with the French and Italian new wave that often gets held up as the pinnacle of artistry. What I have seen of these films, produced in the 1960s and 1970s, pale in comparison to their counterparts being put out on the other side of the Atlantic (i.e., the U.S. of A).

D.C. Metro vs. Chicago El

2007-01-15T13:16:00.000-05:00

Today's Washington Post includes a comparison between D.C.'s Metro and Chicago's El. Surprisingly, writer John Kelly warms to the El, though maybe that's because he realizes how great Chicago is in general:

Last month the entire Kelly family -- our dog, Charlie, included -- piled into the minivan so we could drive 12 1/2 hours and spend Christmas in Evanston, Ill., a gem of a town on the banks of one of the finer Great Lakes and home to My Overachieving Sister-in-Law.
There's no better way to experience a neighborhood than to be in possession of a dog. Forced to walk Charlie at least twice a day to empty him, My Lovely Wife and I drooled at the handsome houses on Orrington Avenue and across from Centennial Park.

Yes, Evanston, which neighbored my hometown and was itself my hometown for four odd years, is a "gem." Even though where I currently live in NoVa kind of reminds me of Evanston, Evanston's Victorian-style homes, eminent stone churches, concentrated downtown, and its perch on the lake makes for much more of a community feeling than the dispersed, ahistoric areas of Arlington County with extemporaneous names like "Courthouse" and "Ballston." I'm not surprised that a Washingtonian is allured by it.

Even I can't romanticize the El, though. Kelly, however, manages to do so:

In fact, when all the assorted out-of-towners took a trip en masse, one of our party was stuck, helpless, at the Transit Card machine as the train approached. He contemplated jumping the turnstile -- he's from New York -- when an amazing thing happened: The driver of the train, who could see him fumbling with his money, waited.
No subway trains are as plush as Metro's -- those carpets, that upholstery -- but I did notice that the L trains I rode were cleaner than Washington's in one way: There weren't as many newspapers. Is it possible that Chicagoans, when they carry a newspaper onto a train, actually carry it off, too? What a concept!
Does it sound like I prefer the L to Metro? Not necessarily. Those elevated platforms are cold. On the other hand, you always know where the stations are. They're perched up in the sky, not buried underground, their location marked with subtle brown monoliths.
The names of the stations are refreshingly direct, too, usually reflecting the streets they're on: Randolph, Madison, State. There's none of this New York Avenue-Florida Avenue-Gallaudet University-XM Radio-Bald Guy With a Hotdog Stand stuff.
Then again, the Windy City has two Chicago stations and two Washington stations. Woe to the person who says, "Meet you at the Chicago Station."
Red Line or Brown?
Just like our Metro, L trains echo with recorded announcements outlining prohibited behavior: No eating, no drinking, no gambling.
Did he say gambling? Whatever for?
I called the CTA to find out. Was this a particular problem? A spokeswoman would only tell me that there is an ordinance "to eliminate predatory types of behavior, such as shell games or sleight-of-hand or other games intended to cheat, defraud, or otherwise obtain money or other items."
You know, that's one thing I haven't seen on Washington's subway, even if it does sometimes seem as if the simple act of taking Metro is a gamble.

Okay, he has a good point about the absurdly cobbled-together names of D.C. Metro Stations. And actually, the double occurring names of El stations aren't as much trouble as Kelly supposes, as long as you're in your part of the city. For instance, if you live in Wicker Park, you'll naturally refer to the Damen Station on the Blue line, whereas if you live in Ravenswood, you consider Damen a stop on the Brown line. Most confusing I suppose are the two Chicago stations that Kelly speaks of, which both sit on Chicago Avenue, about half a mile from each other. Still, most people refer to and frequent the one further East, which is two blocks from Michigan Avenue and one of its gateways of frightening consumption: the American Girl Doll Store-Ralph Lauren Polo Store block. The westernmost Chicago Ave. train station tends to see more office workers than visitors.

D.C.'s Metrorail: Welcome to a Terry Gilliam movie

The El and Metro aren't totally comparable. They actually have somewhat different purposes. Washington, being a much smaller city, and its downtown much more concentrated, needs a fast-moving, state-of-the-art, comprehensive rail system that serves the city as well as the more-populated suburbs. Metro needs to be able to take people from the counties in Maryland and Virginia and dump hordes of them into only a few stations that serve the downtown. The El largely just serves Chicagoans and has a more dispersed downtown to work with--though the Loop is still home to a lot of the office space in the city--with the Metra serving as the regional transit. (True, D.C. has the MARC, but that's geared more for people coming in from the likes of Baltimore). Thus, El--with its frequent slow zones--is kind of a drag to take if you're coming from the suburbs. I'm surprised Kelly, who was going into Chicago from Evanston didn't comment on this, though I guess it must be more noticeable when you're by yourself than when you're with a big group.

The El, whose charm belies its inconvenience

If you want to understand the real downside of the El though, which Kelly doesn't mention at all, read today's Tribune, which illustrates just how out-dated the El really is:

Customers on the CTA Red, Brown and Purple/Evanston Express lines still may feel like they are traveling in one big slow zone until late 2009.

Expect packed trains and even worse delays than those already caused by rickety rails, crumbling viaducts and outmoded train-signaling systems. That's the message CTA president Frank Kruesi sent to riders on the three lines last week.

Commuting times will as much as double beginning in April when the most disruptive phase of the $530 million Brown Line expansion project begins, Kruesi said.

Seriously? When I took the El in from the suburbs to work and see friends, I often got stuck in run-of-the-mill delays. Now systemic delays are certain until 2009 because of this construction, without even factoring in the run-of-the mill delays. This gets to what annoyed me about the CTA and has me appreciating the Metro: The CTA is outdated, and it shouldn't be. Chicago is a world-class city, much more so than D.C., but D.C. is the only one with the world-class public transport. Both cities should have great transport. The El stations may be more charming, as Kelly suggests, than its Metro counterparts, but the frustrations of elevated transit outweigh the benefits of being treated to a constant visual reminder of the dynamic city below.

This weekend, if you travelled on the D.C. Metro, you were treated to exceptional service and information about the closing blue line, which barely, if at all, slowed transportation between Vienna at one end of the line and New Carrollton or Largo at the other, as one might have expected. Maps of the changes in line servicing were everywhere, as were helpful Metro employees. I know that the larger El must need more track work and general updates than D.C., and therefore can't manage such straightforwardness and convenience, but there is no reason why a small city like D.C. should have a monopoly on decent public transportation (it's the federal dollars, I guess).

Teaching in America

2007-01-13T18:40:00.000-05:00

Jacques Barzun's 1944 book Teacher in America, which I am currently reading, is as relevant now as it when it was written. Today, most of the talk about school curriculum starts and ends with how to get students to pass some standardized tests. Teacher in America, if heeded, would inject the much needed "why" into the discussion of how to get students to learn. Barzun contends that students learn best when they understand where the subject being taught sprang from and why it is important. Why do we use variables in mathematics? Why do we study evolution? Why do we apply methods of physical science to the social world? It is important to understand the history of the disciplines to which we are familiarized in school. Barzun worries that without this perspective, school curricula merely perpetuate the idea that scientific disciplines are truth rather than human creation:

If [college boys and girls] leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Farady were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible...and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world--then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room...they are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity (Liberty Fund edition, 129-130).

Barzun goes on to suggest that students should be taught not just about the theories put forth by scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, but about how and why these men labored at what they did, in order to understand that science is not immaterial truth but rather a recent construct of humans. This is not to say that scientists' theories don't represent valuable approximations of how nature works but rather just to remind us all that scientific principles are not immutable truth.

Barzun worries at the same time that the discipline of history is marginalized when it should be broadened. He has a beautiful passage about the importance, the necessity of history in the face of accumulating new inter disciplines that seek to supplant its study:

One can safely generalize and say that under the name of social science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics, many American students today are really offered one single and quite unnecessary subject, namely: Tautology.

History--by which I mean history properly taught--aims at the diametrically opposite results. It is never tautological, it is not confined to one experience or one set of experiences, it does not ape the tricks of physical science; it does not offer brisk formulas for human behavior or pat answers to social problems. But it makes its students think maturely about all the valuable fragments of experience which may have found their way into these latter and shoddier substitutes (152).

Barzun adds "I am not criticizing serious teaching in psychology nor responsible work in sociology under true masters. I have no quarrel with other independent disciplines, but only with the Ersatz that is put forward as fit to supplant history" (152).

Students should be introduced to science and history as somewhat opposite frames with which to view the world--the former finding it quantifiable and predictable, the latter finding it a host for a series of unique events that are nonetheless edifying for its student. Both frames of mind are important for understanding the world, at least as best as one possibly could. What is so valuable about the historical frame of mind is that it lessens one's idealism and cynicism both. As Barzun says:

When broadly based on a good knowledge of western European history (including that of the United States), the historical sense is a comforter and a guide. The possessor understands his neighbors, his government, and the limitations of mankind much better. He knows more clearly not what is desirable but what is possible. He becomes 'practical' in the lasting sense of being taken in neither by panicky fears nor by second-rate Utopias. It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially among the young, for whom the only alternative is cynicism. The historical sense is a preventive against both extremes. It is a moderator which insists on knowing conditions before passing judgements. The historical sense is above all political-minded. It suggests that in the struggles of men with one another, no virtue implies the possession of any other; that motives are mixed, and that no evil is absolutely perverse. For these reasons, the study of history tends to make men more tolerant, without on that account weakening their determination to follow the right: they know to well the odds against it [emphasis mine] (155).

Please no more academic arguments...

2007-01-10T00:16:00.000-05:00

...about anything. I'm beginning to think Washington has a glut of useless pundits (okay, not beginning to think), who not only are inadvertently paid to be useless but in fact, to make things worse. Does it really help us get any closer to figuring out whether "the surge" is a good idea (the fact that it is being called "the surge" hints that it is not) if Joe Klein goes ad hominem on Paul Krugman? Oh, wow, Joe Klein is so irreverent. He doesn't care that "illiberal leftists"(whaaa??) don't like him. Maybe if Joe Klein spent less time keeping track of how many liberal bloggers hate him and spent more time actually making detailed inquiry into whether it is a good idea or not to committ more money and troops to try and secure Baghdad--yes, secure Baghdad--he would be of some help. As it stands, does Joe Klein really help anything? Can he just go away? Can Time Magazine's abhorrent blog oh so cleverly called Swampland please vaporize into thin air? Please, go away Swampland, sink like quicksand into your swamp, into your morass of frivolity. Ana Marie Cox too. Get real jobs, all of y'all.

Some excellent takeaway quotes for 2007 political resolutions

2007-01-07T22:19:00.000-05:00

The Nation's Katha Pollitt:

Think bigger...Decent affordable housing--an issue that's dropped off the radar screen even as housing costs have skyrocketed. Free or nominal tuition in public universities--sounds like utopian madness until you realize that public higher education actually was free, or cheap, until the 1980s.
Stop giving the right credit for our ideas...why heap praise on antiwar reactionaries like Chuck Hagel or right-wing hacks with a soft spot for the ACLU like Bob Barr or antichoicers who draw the line at banning stem-cell research like John Danforth? [My corrollary to this one: stop nostalgicizing the Reagan era.]
Stop looking for a savior. If we create a strong movement, leaders will arise...whatever their merits, if you want the next Democrat in the White House to feel beholden to you, don't act like a groupie two years in advance. Concentrate on building a movement he'll need to court--and satisfy.
Don't think your lifestyle can save the world...the world will never be saved by highly educated, privileged people making different upscale consumer choices.

Bard Pun

2007-01-07T20:13:00.000-05:00

Washington has officially ushered in the Shakespeare Festival, a six month long tribute to the playright who gave us the complex character (as opposed to the simple one dominated by humors). Just like Paris on the Potomac, Shakespeare's works and influence will permeate events all over the city, both large and small, expensive and cheap. It should be cool. However, one thing we must all brace ourselves for is the bad puns that periodicals love to employ, in particular those playing upon the word "bard," an epithet that refers commonly to Shakespeare and means a poet, playright or other scholar in Medieval and early Modern Great Britain. Many blogs and papers are keeping track of the events of Shakespeare Fest; meanwhile I am here to keep track of the bad, excessive puns written about Shakespeare Fest. So far, we have:

"Bard Times" The Washington Post, 1/5/07

As an aside, I'm really sad I missed last night's reading of Twelfth Night at the Kennedy Center, because Balki, i.e. Bronson Pinchot (who will forever be known as Balki) took part. Damn me.

Politico-Really necessary?

2007-01-07T19:24:00.000-05:00

Exiting the Courthouse Metro station today, I came face to face with an alluring ad for The Politico. Upon arriving home, I navigated to the website to find out what the authoritative ad was promoting. Apparently, a couple of Washington Post veterans left their positions to get involed with The Politico, which looks to be a new, multi-platform reporting venture that will cover Capital Hill, the presidential race, and lobbying and issue advocacy "with enterprise, style, and impact." I have no idea what they mean by that, but I have to ask, is a project like The Politico really necessary? Doesn't D.C. already have The Hill, Congressional Quarterly, and Roll Call, not to mention The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, and, even...ugh...The Washington Times? Does Washington really need another outlet for the chattering class to bloviate*--to make uninformed speculations about whether the country is ready for a black man or a woman as president and whether Nancy Pelosi is allowing some Rep into her inner circle? Is such reporting at all useful? It definitely is not at all original. If The Politico is what I think it is--the self-satisfied trailer that flashes all sorts of recognizeable faces doesn't look promising--it embodies the primary problem of political reporting, which covers too much on the subjects of tactics and political posturing and too little on translating what on earth our elected officials actually do each day, what legislation they are proposing and passing, and who exactly their legislation is serving.

Such journalism embodies the problem with this town in general, which is that some folks get so into the idea that they are mixing with the Illuminati, the "powerful" people, that they report on the goings on as if they were in a cafeteria surveying the social dynamics between cliques. Little do any of them realize that such a paltry minority of people know or care who most of Washington is. I enjoy a clever dig at politicians or a little Washington gossip every once in awhile, but I turn to the totally unserious Wonkette for this, not a legitimate paper, and there is a glut of entities that fulfill this need already. If I'm wrong about The Politico, and it is a serious, useful periodical, I'll be the first to admit it. If I am right, I look ever forward to reading another article about whether the nation can elect a Mormon for president or whether Giuliani can win over social conservatives.

*When looking up the word bloviate to make sure I was spelling it right--it is unlisted in my computer's dictionary--I found this very appropriate example of its usage on Dictionary.com: Anyone who has ever spent an idle morning watching the Washington talk shows has probably wondered: how did these people become entitled to earn six-figure salaries bloviating about the week's headlines?
-- Robert Worth, "Quick! The Index!", New York Times, June 3, 2001.

I love contradictions

2007-01-04T21:13:00.000-05:00

Today, the Federal Trade Commission (my place of work)'s huge civil action against four diet pill companies was the subject of a "Today Show" feature! Yes! The FTC Chairman even had an interview with Matt Lauer. Score! It was a winning day for the American consumer, and a winning day for the oft-drowned out message that the way to maintain a healthy weight is to eat controlled portions and get physical activity (the latter, I could stand to do a little more). Short-term solutions like diet pills don't do it, and they eat up a lot of money and encourage psychological hang-ups about food in the process. Just like anything else, if a fix seems too easy, it is. If a celebrity like Anna Nicole Smith is hawking a product, stay away. It's to the "Today Show"'s credit that they are airing this message.

Oh, except, the next segement to come on the video viewer is an awkward breakfast shake recipe demo care of Mariel Hemingway, whose new book is going to help you lose weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle. She makes a pitiful smoothie with a bunch of powder and some blueberries. She advises not to totally restrict anything, which is fine advice, but I don't need Mariel Hemingway to tell me that. Plus, I don't need to ever go on a diet that would have me drink that weird looking smoothie. Blech.

So, thanks "Today Show," for exposing the diet industry for what it is, if only for five glorious minutes.

Not very useful journalism about Clinton and Obama votes

2007-01-01T16:38:00.000-05:00

In today's Washington Post, an article comparing the voting records of Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sets out to find rifts between the two possible presidential candidates. On the one hand, the author of the article does try to illustrate the complexity of Senate votes, which are so often misconstrued; on the other hand, she herself helps to misconstrue Clinton's and Obama's voting records by suggesting there are vast differences between the two and by the way in which she interprets their votes.

For one, Clinton and Obama really don't differ over a lot. They have voted with each other 90 percent of the time, and the votes the author cites as indicating polarization between the two Senators are relatively inconsequential, like a vote over whether a Senator can hold a separate job. The biggest point of departure between Clinton and Obama appears to be over requiring mandates of the-corn based fuel ethanol at refineries. Obama, who represents a state with heavy ethanol interests unsurprisingly supported the measure; Clinton, whose state up until recently had little connection to the ethanol industry opposed the measure.

From what I can tell, both Clinton's and Obama's voting records show general good judgement, even when they come down on opposite sides on a vote, but this article makes something out of nothing, several times:

Obama voted to increase taxes when he opposed a package of business breaks that included the extension of middle-class provisions. Clinton voted for the tax bill -- before she voted against it, as did Obama, in the legislation's final form.

For one thing, the phrasing "voted for the tax bill--before she voted against it" is obviously a deliberate attempt to resurrect the language that got John Kerry in trouble in 2004 when the Bush campaign opaquely referenced Kerry's vote against a defense appropriations bill after he sponsored an amendment to pay for the 87 billion appropriations bill by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts. That amendment was voted down, so Kerry was perfectly consistent in voting against the bill. Just like the Bush campaign, the author of this article makes no effort to figure out why Clinton voted against the legislation in its final form, which is a perfectly reasonable and common thing for a Senator to do.

Furthermore, deducing Obama's position on this bill as a vote "to increase taxes" is not useful. Obama voted to prevent tax breaks on businesses, which is not the same as voting for a tax increase. Coupling the extension of middle-class tax provisions with business tax breaks is a hallmark of a Republican Congress that eagerly neutered any bill that tried to help middle and working class Americans by adding pro-business (deficit-increasing) provisions. It is perfectly reasonable for Senators Clinton and Obama to see the costs of such a bill outweighing the benefits. The writer unfortunately fits these votes into the all too convenient (and mindless) attack-ad rubric.

This writer goes on to point out how such votes can get misconstrued--

As Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and former senator Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) discovered in previous campaigns, the Congressional Record is a minefield for White House contenders, a catalogue of provincial concerns, convoluted logic and compromised principles.

--though she herself is helping to misconstrue votes. It is unhelpful for a journalist to effectively sit back and let a politician define the terms of a debate, by writing about the tactical as opposed to the substantive ramifications of a vote record. What good is a journalist if not to interpret the complexity of Senate votes for the average newspaper reader?

An aside about the issue of experience for candidates in the upcoming presidential election: I want to point out that members of the current administration with years of experience--Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--and those with minimal experience--George W. Bush, who had four years as governor of the state with the least powerful gubernatorial office--have equally screwed things up. I don't think experience matters so much as good judgement, good intentions, and proven dexterity in past elected and non-elected occupations. Too much experienced arguably clouded the minds of men like Cheney and Rumsfeld who have been too oriented towards old threats to sufficiently understand new ones.

On the issue of experience though, Barack Obama was one of the best if not the best legislator in the Illinois State Senate for a number of years. Although Edwards--whose positions I like--appears to be touted as more experienced than Obama, Obama will have had almost as much time in the Senate by 2008 as Edwards did in 2004, plus time as a state senator. I also think it's interesting that the experience card is used both ways. One is a "Washington insider" if s/he is experienced (plus, s/he has years of a House or Senate record dredged up as ammunition against him/her), one is not up to the job if s/he is inexperienced. This is why I am going to look at the substantive accomplishments and abilities of a particular candidate rather than trust the abstractions over qualities like experience, which tend to be used for spin either for or against the candidate.

Yikes, I'm glad I'm not a pre-adolescent

2006-12-30T16:13:00.000-05:00

Part of the pathos here should simply be chalked up to this being Long Island, but sheesh:

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show.

There is something wrong with our culture and its nonexistent standards when relatives are cheering at this like fools. Kind of makes you wonder whether adolescence was worth defining as a stage of life and whether the sexual revolution has been taken to its most absurd end.

Top Ten Cool Things of the Year (in the U.S.)

2006-12-29T17:02:00.000-05:00

This wasn't such a great year. The situation in Iraq deteriorated even more, and yet OJ Simpson's absurd book seemed to generate more outrage among some--namely the over employed entertainment media. So, what was great about 2006? Not a whole lot. Doing my best to remember what on earth happened this year, I'll try to extract the few cool things that did happen, in no particular order:

1. Stephen Colbert at the Annual White House Correspondents Dinner: In May, Colbert helped draw attention to an event that usually serves as a bad inside joke for a few hundred people by humorously critcizing the president's famous ego. He mocked Bush's supposed steely resolve--"Events can change; this man's beliefs never will"--cutting it down to the publicity stunt it is:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers, and rubble, and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Not only was Colbert's bit itself hilarious, but it became a watershed media event. YouTube, 2006's ubiquitous website, proved especially useful in the days after the event, allowing people to access what really went down at the dinner rather than taking the mainstream media's word for it. Their word was often non-existent, because many outlets initially determined the event not newsworthy--including The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune--despite the ramifications of the event: one of the country's most clever comedians had pointedly skewered one of the most insulated of modern presidents, who was sitting just a few feet away. It should be no surprise then that the second target of Colbert's routine was the lackadaisical media--many in attendance at the dinner--who have so often failed to vigorously question George W. Bush about his agenda:

Over the last five years, you people were so good—over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. ... And then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

The event was remarkable for fusing politics and entertainment for constructive good, for being accessibile to a mass audience, and for serving as a jumping off point for debate about the usefulness of the media. The Colbert performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner is perhaps the emblematic event of a year of consumer participation in newsmaking.

2. The Democratic Victory in the 2006 Congressional Elections: One can easily imagine the media narrative that would have persisted had the Republicans maintained control of Congress after the November 2006 elections: that Americans were satisfied with the direction of the War in Iraq despite visible reservations, that the economy wasn't bad enough to require a renewed focus on growing inequity--like the recent cuts in student aid and the failure to increase the minimum wage--and that, in general, Americans were satisfied with the Republican social agenda. A wisdom that had prevailed for years changed on November 7.

Up against a gerrymandered Congress, the Democrats still won big in the House. They also managed to eke out victory in the Senate, knocking out some formidable incumbents like George Allen of Virginia and Conrad Burns of Montana. Furthermore, they won with great help from the so-called "liberal bloggers," whose fundraising, organizing, and message generating did justice to the term netroots. The Democrats in 2006 were not the Democrats of 1996, who relied upon the contributions of moneyed coffers and directed most of their energies to retaining the presidency rather than making inroads in Congress.

The new Congress is focusing on a different course in Iraq--though it is still up to the intransigent President to assume one--and on economic issues that were ignored under one-party rule. Plus, the 2006 election was also a victory against apathy, with the number of voters up in the usually less participatory midterm elections. Especially encouraging: 24 percent of Americans 18-30 voted, the largest percentage in 20 years.

3. Harvard, then Princeton and UVA, End Early Decision: In September, Harvard and then Princeton and the University of Virginia moved to end the early admission option, deciding that it favored savvier applicants from more advantaged backgrounds. Although other top schools do not yet see the need to eliminate early decision, Harvard at least brought to attention the need for universities to be attentive to the disparate sophistication of prospective students with the college application process. Although some schools, like my Alma mater Northwestern, have made some reasonable points on why early decision still suits them, it is good for universities to publicly discuss institutional inequities. Hopefully, Harvard and its peers will figure out how better to assist both low income and middle class students with the costs of their education.

4. TV Programming Continues to Improve: Although there is still drek on television--there always will be--some TV programming continues to delight. While I think some of the critics favorite shows, particularly "Weeds" and "Scrubs" are overrated, "The Office," "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show," and HBO programming continue to shine. "The Office" was rightfully awarded an Emmy for its fantastic ability to find humor in the mundane and for the genuine performances put forth by its cast. After a reportedly bumpy first year, "The Office" figured out how to adeptly adapt the British version to reflect the nature of the American workplace in year two. (Now, there is a French and German version of "The Office," showing that the workplace is a universal source of humor, though not necessarily the same humor). Office romances, career dissatisfaction, narrow-mindedness, and the American work ethic are depicted realistically and hilariously. To think, 10 years ago, the only good things going on network TV were "Frasier," "Friends" (meh) and "Seinfeld," and the sitcom (shudder) reigned supreme. Hopefully, the cool event of 2007 will be that cable companies lose their regional monopolies and prices decrease (I wish).

5. Some Bad People Went to Prison: This year, Jack Abramoff and Jeffrey Skilling, two men who enjoyed far too much power in the 1990s, were convicted to formidable prison terms. Abramoff was convicted of conspiracy to bribe a public official, defrauding a client, and tax evasion, and was sentenced to the minimum of 10-years, in anticipation that he will cooperate with investigations of other corruption cases. He and his lobbying firm contributed to the excess of Republican-controlled Washington. Abramoff was intimately involved with disgraced former majority leader Tom DeLay, who his lobbying firm treated to trips to the North Mariana Islands, and Abramoff himself secretly funded the trips of other Republican Representatives. Abramoff's corruption is too extensive to document here, but concurrent to his demise went the careers of a lot of disgraceful people, including DeLay, Randall "Duke" Cunningham, and Robert Ney.

Jeff Skilling, former CEO of the defunct Enron Corporation might be the person most single-handedly responsible for the California electricity crisis of 2000-2001, in which the state's recently deregulated electricty grid allowed for Enron employees to manipulate the energy markets in there, causing prices to spike and supply to be unevenly distributed. Too bad Skilling can't provide redress for all of the pension plans that were decimated by the Enron collapse as well as for the electricty bills and costs incurred by the state of California during the energy crisis.

6. Immigrant Rallies Across the Nation: Often defined by their demagogic opposition, tens of thousands of immigrants and those in favor of immigrant interests rallied across the nation in April, drawing attention to their contributions and advertising their presence to Congress, which was then considering immigration reform. For a group that fills mostly the least desirable jobs in the country, immigrants get a lot of flack, despite that the United States is a nation of immigrants. A typical complaint against illegal immigrants is that they use up public services, but wouldn't pushing for legalization and thereby getting them to pay into the system be a good way to prevent this? Of course, this would have to be accompanied by pay approximating a living wage...

7. FDA Approves HPV Vaccine and Plan B OTC: The current administration has not wholly succeeded in stymieing progress of its agencies. The FDA approved the Human papillomavirus vaccine and over the counter (OTC) Plan B contraception. Though religious zealots will probably tell you otherwise, there is never anything wrong with vaccinating against a sexually transmitted disease. The idea that it encourages unprotected sex or sex in general is like saying that a flu vaccine encourages not washing one's hands. The approval of Plan B also generated controversy, but it will make an unpleasant process easier to handle for many people.

8. An Inconvenient Truth Brings More Attention to Global Warming: In a year of erratic temperatures and a hostile climate, Al Gore used his influence and celebrity for good, bringing attention to the force behind climate fluctuations. It is amazing that the existence of global warming needs such a forceful defense, even though it is not in scientific dispute, but that is why Gore's contribution was so constructive. Though of course not as watchable as a movie like Casino Royale, Gore does an admirable job of meticulously deconstructing the arguments against global warming and detailing those for it. If parts of our country are submerged under water in the not too distant future, Al Gore can (somberly) say I told you so.

9. Google Buys YouTube: In an acquisition that didn't reek of evil, the search engine giant bought out the user-generated content giant. Not only does YouTube's searchable video content model seem commensurate with Google's model, but Google appears to be an encouraging parent corporation, managing to maintain the integrity and while innovating its other acquisitions, like this here software I'm using. (Meanwhile, the telecom market is consolidated by another dispiriting merger, as AT&T's absorption of Bell South Corp. is approved by the FCC).

10. Bob Woodward's State of Denial Released: The tipping point of popular opinion against George W. Bush must surely have been reached when Bob Woodward--establishment journalist and former Bush administration cheerleader--released State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III. Woodward's book seemed to cement the view that the War in Iraq was a mistake, and that its execution was poorly managed at best, providing an indictment of all of the key actors in the administration who consistently lied and misled over the years to save face.

This was a pretty difficult list to come up with, because this was a pretty difficult year, but I know I'm forgetting things. Please comment with any additional suggestions or any recommended subtractions.

Krugman introduces new considerations of fiscal policy

2006-12-27T11:22:00.000-05:00

In his most recent column, Paul Krugman considered the Democrats' position in terms of making fiscal policy, cautioning them not to hasten back to "Rubinomics," the doctrine named after Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary that emphasized reducing budget deficits. The policies of Rubinomics are credited with lowering interest rates and in turn precipitating the economic boom of the 1990s and with replenishing the federal treasury with the revenue that comes with a good economy, which thus garnered a greater surplus than even Clinton officials had hoped.

In hindsight, the focus on deficit-reduction is a rare triumph of long term considerations over short ones. When the Clinton 1993 deficit-reduction package was introduced, many in Congress opposed it because it raised taxes on the upper tax bracket. In just a few years, the upper and upper-middle class--the interests who had opposed tax increases in 1993--became some of the biggest beneficiaries of Rubinomics, though what made the 90s distinct from the 80s was that more of the population shared in the boom. (Remember when "Help Wanted" signs were everywhere?). The deficit reduction act of 1993 did not promise immediate benefits, as the Bush tax cuts did, but rather it stemmed long term growth, and the benefits were more immediate than people expected. It is pretty hard to believe that Congress and the White House, albeit for a brief period, were far-thinking.

Today, Democrats, remembering the success of Rubinomics, seem eager to take it up again. They're up against an even larger budget deficit than the one that faced Clinton in 1993, but the party itself seems to have coalesced around deficit reduction policy.

In 2000, budget surpluses were projected through 2004.

And yet, Paul Krugman is warning Democrats that it might not be their best bet:

[I]t's now clear that while Rubinomics made sense in terms of pure economics, it failed to take account of the ugly realities of American politics.

And the lesson of the last six years is that Democrats shouldn't spend political capital trying to bring the deficit down. They should refrain from actions that make the deficit worse. But given a choice between cutting the deficit and spending more on good things like health care reform, they should choose the spending.

The unforeseen--and how could it be foreseen?--problem with Rubinomics is that it left a budget surplus to the Bush Administration to be held up wrongfully as an example of government largess in what former Clinton economist Brad DeLong has referred to as President Bush's "right-wing class war." In our politically charged environment, argues Krugman, we should not give Republicans the opportunity to squander a budget surplus again:

I'm for pay as you go. The question, however, is whether to go further. Suppose the Democrats can free up some money by fixing the Medicare drug program, by ending the Iraq War and/or clamping down on war profiteering, or by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts. Should they use the reclaimed revenue to reduce the deficit or to spend it on other things?

The answer, I now think, is to spend the money--while taking great care to make sure it is spent well, not squandered--and let the deficit be.

At first read, I was somewhat appalled by Krugman's prescription, which seemed to put economic policy at the dangerous behest of politics. The "state of our politics," says Krugman, is not healthy enough to leave a budget surplus to the other party, but when has the state of our politics ever been healthy. Must we always make fiscal policy based on our fears of what the other party will do with the budget?

And yet, realities are realities, and this country needs health care reform. One reality is that there will always be interests in this country that want the government to take no action on issues that concern the nation's general welfare--like health care--because they perceive it drawing unfairly from their incomes. Never mind that our current health care system--with the uninsured driving up premiums for everyone else, with small businesses straining to pay for employee benefits, and with an often sub-standard level of care for even those who are insured--is taxing everyone. Yet, the anti-government interests will always be well-represented and will probably always see their interests in the short-term, advocating tax cuts (for them) and decreased regulation. When their surrogates get into power, it will be against their interest to encourage good government. Now that some of them have been thrown out of power, maybe it's best that Democrats use their political capital to solve problems that need to be solved rather than leave behind a treasury to be pillaged. I don't blame Krugman for seeing it this way.

The Borat debate reemerges

2006-12-26T13:40:00.000-05:00

It being the time when film critics offer their top ten list of movies from the last year, the debate over whether the Borat movie is funny, manipulative, racist, or just plain dumb rages on. I still submit that it is highly overrated and lacks most of the humor of the television show. I have not yet seen a satisfactory rejoinder on why it is funny for Borat to wreck some harmless man's antiques or what exactly Baron Cohen is skewering about Southern gentility by re-emerging from the bathroom with a bag of feces at a dinner party. Many of the episodes in Borat seem trying, as if Baron Cohen could not get his subjects to be sufficiently ignorant, coarse, or racist without him acting obnoxious. Even then, they don't always come off badly: the befuddled shop antique owner seems helpless, the members of the Southern dining group understandably end the dinner early. The thesis of the movie--that Americans are an ignorant lot--seems to have been established before the movie was shot. On this score, Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader makes a good point:

I keep reading that this movie is a sly (or not so sly) critique of racism and intolerance based on ignorance, but Sacha Baron Cohen's apparent semi-ignorant intolerance of the Kazakhs is almost always factored out of the discussion. It's pretty easy to paint them as a pack of pathetic anti-Semites if you know nothing about them, but isn't that the kind of glibness Borat is supposedly attacking?

To me, the interesting aspect of the television episodes of "Borat" is the inhibitions revealed even in the most bigoted of his interview subjects. When Borat is driving with a blatant anti-Semite, the man goes off on Jews in a frighteningly absurd rant, going so far as to sanction the act of rounding up Jews. He then stops himself to say that we don't do that in this country. Oftentimes, when Borat starts baiting people with questions that could incense their latent racism, he receives variations on that same response: that we do not say those things in this country. Borat's bluntness is often met with cautious reluctance to disclose true beliefs, as when he gets a Republican primary candidate to hesitantly acknowledge that the logic of his beliefs mean that Jews will go to hell. In "Borat," Baron Cohen reveals a nation where political correctness has been internalized, and this may not be such a bad thing. Borat the film appears to be getting accolades for being "offensive," but that's no feat if the clever humor of the television show is lacking.

Apocalypto wasn't accurate?!?!

2006-12-24T23:09:00.000-05:00

An article in Salon from Mayan expert Marcello Canuto about Apocalypto--nay--Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and questions over its accuracy:

The movie tracks a young Mayan man who is captured in a surprise raid on his village. Forced to abandon his family, he and his companions are taken to the nearby city to be sacrificed. He manages to escape and, pursued by his captors, attempts to return to his village to save his family. During his getaway, he reaches a beach where he witnesses the arrival of Spaniards.
This final scene tells us that the movie focuses on Maya society on the eve of Spanish contact in the 16th century. Yet the Maya city portrayed in the movie, central to its plot, dates roughly to the 9th century. This is akin to telling a story about English pilgrims founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and showing them living in longhouses described in "Beowulf." In fact, Gibson incorporates Maya images from as far back as 300 B.C. Throughout the movie, these anachronisms make Maya civilization seem timeless, and undermine the idea that the Maya could and did respond to change.

Another question I had more about the logistical accuracy of Apocalypto: how did main character Jaguar Paw so quickly and expertly find his way back to his village in the forest of the Yucatan peninsula from the city center? And who is supposed to symbolize Jesus--Jaguar Paw, or his water-birthed child? Also, why was the forest so close to the cornfields as well as the beaches that the Spaniards land on?

Actually, I was disappointed that Apocalypto did not actually tackle head-on the downfall of Mayan civilization, whose supposed causes--pestilence, colonization, depression of trade, slave revolt--are in dispute; however, maybe it's for the best that Mel Gibosn is not the one to do this. As Canuto says of Gibsons enormous inaccuracies:

If there were ever an apocalypse in the history of the Maya -- and herein lies the ultimate demoralizing irony of the movie -- it would be because of European contact. But in the movie, after two hours of excess, hyperbole and hysteria, the Spaniards represent the arrival of sanity to the Maya world. The tacit paternalism is devastating.

Nonetheless, I loved Apocalypto only because it was totally INSANE; and fortunately it has compelled me, as the writer hopes, to look into the real history of Maya civilization rather than trust Mel Gibson.

Tribune's silly obsession with the Obama-Rezko connection could be turned into something more useful

2006-12-24T22:02:00.000-05:00

I'm convinced that at least half of the reason that Chicago has the reputation for politics more scandalous than other parts of the country is because scandal is drummed up by the local media. Rags like the Tribune and the Sun-Times use the language of "appearances" of corruption and guilt by association to imply that which is most sinister.

Witness the Tribune's current efforts to hang the sign of a man named Antoin Rezko on Senator Barack Obama. Rezko was involved in some state government scandals, and the Tribune has since decided to impute Obama based on association. Their most recent implication is that Obama's office gave a college student an internship as a favor to Rezko, who appears to be a family friend of this intern. Obama's office is of course cornered into denying that Obama has ever done any favors for Rezko. Honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the intern got her job through Rezko, not because Obama is uniquely bereft of an ethical compass but because that's how internships generally work on the Hill.

Perhaps the Tribune could use its considerable but dwindling resources for reportage to cover the more interesting angle of how internships are ferreted out in Washington. The current thought is that these relatively inconsequential jobs would serve as good reward for loyal (and big) donors to the Congressman. I don't think there is anything wrong with hiring someone loyal to a candidate-- a campaign worker, for instance, is a natural choice to fill a post-election job--but the kin of a big donor is someone who has gotten a job entirely because of blood association to wealth.

This leads to what I see as a larger problem of entitlement by some of the wealthy and well-connected in our society. It is revolting when people get jobs or admissions to college because of their family connections. My revulsion is directed not just at the party who is doing the admitting but also at the donor expecting a quid pro quo. If you donate to a university or candidate, it should be out of belief in the institution or the cause, not to tip the scales in favor of your child. From what I have heard from people who have worked in admissions at colleges, it is general policy to give a big donor's black sheep kin the benefit of the doubt. Such practices reconcile us all to playing the game, "networking," valuing superficial connections over merit and repeating the mantra that this is just how things work. Wouldn't it be nice though if some of these privelged people could lead from the top and not expect special treatment for their children?

The blogging landscape of 2006

2006-12-23T13:47:00.000-05:00

Bloggers were the targets of many verbal floggings this year. The view towards the act of blogging became more hostile and more mocking, hostile towards those who would deign themselves worthy enough to express opinions on that which they are not experts, mocking of those who feel the need to publish the mundane events of their daily lives to make them available to the world.

As political bloggers on the center-left became more influential this election year, they were derided by professional columnists like David Broder and David Brooks. Broder accused them of vituperation and general ineffectiveness back in June when the YearlyKos convention was taking place. "Thus, we have blogger Jerome Armstrong, a Kos partner, arguing for mounting campaigns everywhere, no matter the odds," he chided then. And yet, some of the most unlikely success stories of the Democratic upset were those supported by the bloggers, and some of the most stunning defeats were those picked by the establishment. Thus emerged Senators-elect Jon Tester and Jim Webb. Thus languished Tammy Duckworth and Harold Ford, Jr.

Still, bloggers did not catch a break in 2006. Instead, establishment writers took it upon themselves to drown out the cacophony. Bloggers became representative of an advent of "narcissim," as another professional columnist, George Will put it. "So much of what is done on the web is people getting on there and writing their diaries as though everyone ought to care about everyone’s inner turmoils. I mean, it’s extraordinary," Will lamented earlier this month. Why all of this fulminating over the massification of writing? Broder, Brooks, and Will imply that writing is for an elite, and when the masses do it, it becomes incendiary, uncivil, and artless. Expressing one's opinion through blog channels is an act of narcissim (never mind that Will does it every week in his column for the Washington Post).

Little-acknowledged in all of the commentary about blogs and bloggers is what to make of the phenomenon it evidences: that millions of people across the world are driven to write in their free time. Writing, which we feared a dying skill, mauled by the allure of cognitive disengagement encouraged by visual media, particularly the television, and the laziness of the current vernacular, is enjoyable to millions. Sure, the instantaneousness of blogging does not promote revision, but it does not hinder it either. Though Time's person of the year might have been lame, I find it amazing and gratifying that those without access to the establishment channels of communication--television, newspapers--are embracing the Internet and yes, writing, and it is worth celebrating, not excoriating.

A little perspective for the holidays

2006-12-22T00:36:00.000-05:00

Weather is such a mundane part of existence--the stuff of small talk when we've run out of other small talk--but it can destroy us all. That is hardly mundane. I am reminded of this again with the snows in Denver, or "fresh pow," as I have recently understood it to be called by ski bums (or just mythical ski bums). About a year ago, my mom and I set off to Boston to see my brother's biannual sketch comedy show. As it happened, the night, we left a big snow storm was predicted to hit both Chicago, and--if I recall correctly--Boston. (A sidenote: I don't know that I have ever been to Boston when it hasn't precipitated heavily or been very cold).

My mom and I could have gone into the evening with one of two mindsets: (1) What an inconvenience for us, we better get out of Chicago, getting delayed is terrible or (2) This is out of our control, we should only fly if the airlines assure us it's safe, and the fact that we're even getting driven to the airport amidst a snow storm and that planes are attempting to fly out is above and beyond what we should expect. It indicates something impressive about modern technology and in turn the way we become accustomed to convenience. We chose the latter approach, which made the experience much less vexing. We sat in a cab for maybe two hours and were delayed another two hours or so at O'Hare. That's all. Somehow we made it to Boston the same evening.

I try to think of that night every time I face an inconvenience that is beyond my control. It's amazing how much our society requires that everything move smoothly, that I think every once in awhile, it is worth stepping back and awing at it all. This year, if it happens to snow in Chicago when I fly back, I know I'll be frustrated, especially if I can't get there until the middle of next week--as is the case for people going to Denver this year--but I can't help but think that because we rely on things to be convenient all of the time, we forget how unnatural such convenience is, how hard people have to work to keep stores open 24/7 and airports running through the holidays, a time when inclement weather is hardly rare. Maybe every once in awhile, it's valuable for us to recognize that there are forces out of our control, especially in the form of our environment, and that we should therefore leave ourselves some legroom when those situations occur.

For more perspective on the holidays, better than that which I can offer, watch It's a Wonderful Life. It's a movie that's all about putting life into perspective, and it is always appropriate at this time of year.

When Academics is Absurd

2006-12-19T11:51:00.000-05:00

The academic fields in the humanities and sometimes the social sciences (especially sociology and anthropology) are too often a wasteland of gratuitous jargon and dogmatic promulgation of strange critical theories. Words like "space," "discourse," "post-colonial," "post-structuralist," "post-[fill in the blank]" and "queer theory," are all too common, acting as crutches, the substitution of faddish critical theories for independent thought. Furthermore, some subjects of academic study are absolutely untenable, like "Sex and the City," hip hop (at least, most of what appears to be out there), and chick lit. It is only when you read the undergraduate and masters theses titles that you understand just how absurd are some of the things that get passed off as academic and why searching for ridiculous thesis titles online is an entertaining pasttime. I bring you the fruits of my labor, broken down by taxonomies of drek:

Here's a pretty standard one:
Narrating My Body, Narrating Myself. Body Narratives of Romanian Teenage Girls

Grabbing two unrelated ideas and finding causality between the two. Bonus points if postcolonial discourse is involved:

Genocide 'n' Juice: Reading the Postcolonial Discourses in Hip-Hop Culture.

Lesbians, space, and more lesbians:

Experiences of Lesbians at the Belgrade Pride 2001 and Zagreb Pride 2002

Re-imagining 'Romanianness': The LGBT Movement Challenging the Heteropatriarchal Order of the Nation

Sexually Active Connection In Long Term Queer Female Relationships

Drowning in Loneliness and Writing the Blues: Creating Lesbian Space in the Novels of Radclyffe Hall and Leslie Feinberg

Sapphic Sisters in the City of Brotherly Love: The Interactions of Space, Community and Lesbian Sexuality

Gender bending:

Children Doing and Undoing Gender. The Case of a Polish Kindergarten Group

Sickos, Psychos, and Sluts: Images of Transgendered Women in Media Culture

"That's an Extra One:" Adolescent Transgender Identity and Self-Acceptance

How Television Viewing During Adolescence May Influence Exotic Dancers' Perceptions of Female Gender Roles: An Exploratory Study

Conflict in Congo: Locating the Gendered Body

General weirdness:

Environmentalism Without Guarantees: The Spectral and Scatological Politics of Displacement in Miyazaki Hayao's Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)

Images of Japanese Women Who Seek Emancipation Through the Experience of Death

Gratuitous use of vagina:

Vagina Dialogues: The Developmental Underpinnings of Older Women's Fear of Losing Youth and Beauty

Pleasing Pussy: Exploring Women-Centered Pornograph

Let's not give short shrift to the other half of queer theory:

The Racial Stereotype as Sexual Fetish: Latino Racial Fetishism in the U.S. Gay Male Cultural Imagination

Utter bullshit (which was probably written the weekend before it was due):

Self-Mutilation or Body Beautification: The Meaning of Tattooing and Piercing And Implications for Social Work Practice

(Re)producing Masculinities in Sports: Football as 'the Boys' Game'

Exploring the Relationship Between Resident Assistant Leadership Styles and Student Satisfaction in the Residence Halls

Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City

Comforting Touch Between Nurses and Patients: An Exploratory Study with Implications for Medical Social Work Practice

Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: the Musical Vernacular of Black Girls Play

Deconstructing the Vagina Monologues: A Taxonomic Approach to Social Change

Race, Class, Conflict and Empowerment: On Ice Cube's 'Black Korea'

Post-Graduation Career and Education Plans for Student-Athletes Who Participate in CoCurricular Activities

What??:

Systematics, Osteology, Sexual Dimorphism, Age Classes, and Population Dynamics of Teleoceras Fossiger from Jack Swayze Quarry, Clark County, Kansas, and Minium Quarry, Graham County, Kansas

and my personal favorites:

Erotic Sadomasochism: Women Finding Meaning and Opportunities for Personal Growth through Radical Sexual Practices

Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of Poop Report.Com

Movies I Would (Shamelessly) Like to See

2006-12-18T23:42:00.000-05:00

December to mid-January is about the only time of the year I go to the movie theater with regularity, but right now, there are not a whole lot of promising movies out there, even though it's "Oscar Season," but there are a bunch of crazy ones churning about. These may actually be the most promising. Here's what I'm going to see if I go to the theater over winter vacation:

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto: This lengthy tale about the end of Mayan civilization seems to have been inspired by Mel Gibson's religiosity and taste for the epic. Mel is proof that full-out crazy people should be encouraged to make movies more often. Whereas an imaginative but failed movie like Waterworld probably drowned in its own ambition because Kevin Costner is too sane, Gibson's Apocalypto appears to deliver. A movie with an insane premise needs an equally insane director, and Mel is just that. Like many religious zealots, Gibson's pet obsession with the end of days and appears to have driven him to ponder how past civilizations fell in order to anticipate how exaclty the Second Coming will unfold. This is the man after all who said of his direction for The Passion of the Christ, "The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just directing traffic." Even though a crazy man like Mel is best left to occupy himself with such thoughts, the rest of us are hardly loath to find the subject interesting. Apocalypto promises to be great whether it is good or just plain ridiculous.

Dreamgirls: Some people will probably dismiss this one right off the bat because it prominently features Beyonce Knowles in a serious acting role and purports to resurrect Eddie Murphy from the ash heap of also-rans, but the story itself is quite rich. Based on the career trajectory of the Supremes, Dreamgirls examines the difficulties endured by a pop music group because of their race and gender. Knowles and Jennifer Hudson's characters embody the dilemma faced by black musicians in the 1950s-1970s of whether to embrace blackness or appeal to an increasingly receptive white audience. Jamie Foxx plays the Berry Gordy figure who champions Knowles' ability to appeal to the latter group, while Hudson increasingly moves in the other direction. If nothing else, I am interested to find out how the movie treats these themes. (For a nice explanation of these themes, see Pop Matters' review). I'm a little worried, after all, because Dreamgirls is based on a Broadway Musical! and I haven't been much impressed with Broadway's treatment of serious subjects post-West Side Story. Still, like Apocalypto, Dreamgirls promises to be good whether or not it is actually quality or just melodrama with glittery costumes, big hair, and electrifying ballads.

Rocky Balboa: I am a fairly devoted Rocky fan, in part because I cannot actually remember how bad the later sequels were. No, I recall only the awesomely good of the Rocky series, such as the ambitious analogies between Communism's fall at the hand of democratic capitalism and Ivan Drago's fall at the hands of Rocky Balboa or the operatic travesty of Apollo Creed's death by blow to head. I can't quite conjure up the badness of the dialogue, though I'm sure it is bad enough to make even Joe Eszterhas cringe. And I only speak of Rocky IV; Rocky V is actually the nadir and conveniently the end of the series. Until now. Just as in Rocky V, Rocky is back in Philadelphia in Rocky Balboa, now widowed (Rest in Peace, Adrian), and living of humble means as a deli owner. Just as it did 30 odd years ago, the boxing ring calls Rocky back, and, still up a few brain cells, Rocky answers. Rocky Balboa runs the risk of taking already tired themes and wringing out what life is left of them; on the other hand, a movie aboutRocky in Winter could be a meditative last hurrah for the long-lasting series. We shall see.

Metro Fare Hikes are Counter-Intuitive

2006-12-16T13:42:00.000-05:00

In this country, the gospel of the market reigns supreme, often to the detriment of smart and far-thinking policy. Witness the recent proposal by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (aka "Metro") to raise fares during rush hour or peak time to as much as 2.10 to head off a $116 million budget deficit. On the one hand, a good public transportation system is worth the money from its riders, and the Metro is one of the better public transportation systems in the country. On the other hand, it should be expected that a public transportation system is not a money maker and is often a money loser.

What Metro is losing, however, is gained back both financially and in terms of quality of life: in the form of decreased traffic, less roadwork, and less pollution. It is in drivers' as well as rail and bus commuters' interest to have a good public transportation system, even if that means paying a little extra in taxes for it. There needs to be some sort of understanding though, that Metro is not a money-maker, that it will often lose money, and that public good services such as public transportation often do lose money. The alternatives are worse. When Metro riders say that the potential fare hikes will push them to drive to work, Metro faces the vicious cycle where it has to continue to raise fares to make up for lost revenue because of commuters who no longer ride Metro because the fares got too high.

Metro is applying incentives to change the nature of the demand of Metro riders by proposing to increase fares during high peak hours (5 to 9:30 am and 3 to 7 pm on weekdays) to encourage riders to travel in off-hours, but as letter writers to the Post have said, it's pretty difficult for most people to change their traveling times. Most of us have to be at work within the peak traveling times. Metro also might charge a higher fare on people who get off at heavy traffic stations like Farragut North, but again, there is little most people can do to change their destination train station. Market calculations of supply-demand and incentives are not intuitive to public transportation like the Metro. Ideally, the business district in D.C. would be more spread out and workers would have flex time, but as yet, peoples' working patterns are pretty rigid.

Edited to add: Virginia legislators need to increase the revenue they pay into the Metro, especially considering it services so much of Northern Virginia, and Virginia pays significantly less in taxes than D.C. or Maryland. (I'm willing to say this as a Virginia resident).

Small Acts of Immense Laziness

2006-12-15T13:01:00.000-05:00

On days when I walk past my apartment's trash chute to throw my garbage away, there are, almost unfailingly, large items underneat the chute cannot fit into it but are meant to be thrown away. Most annoying is when someone places a large box underneath the chute to be thrown away when s/he could easily collapse the box and fit it into the chute (or better yet, recycle it). A vaccuum cleaner and a roll suitcase missing a wheel are just some of the other items that my neighbors have put under the chute. The neighbor(s) responsible for this are not only creating a small mess in the corridor but communicating their immense laziness. This neighbor apparently deems him/herself too good to properly dispose of his/her trash and rather leaves it to the people who clean our apartment complex. Behavior like this is just plain lazy; there is no other word for it. No one is above taking out his/her own trash.

The Last Unpaid Job

2006-12-11T22:18:00.000-05:00

In the summer, Washington, D.C. becomes a town of interns, those lucky college students who come looking for the connections and perhaps a little experience to build a resume in anticipation of the post-college job search. However, for those returning post-college to look for a job the old meritocratic way--sending in some cover letters and resumes in response to job postings--lacking "hill experience" can be a disadvantage, lacking explicit connections, even moreso. HillZoo.com, the de facto website of Congressional job openings, is not necessarily a haven for paid work, as it mostly seems to post internships. Many people even feel compelled take such positions after college, having nonetheless earned a bachelors degree and often thousands of dollars in loans along the way.

Internships seem to be popping up everywhere nowadays to the point that the intern is the new glorified secretary. Why? Because employers love cheap labor and because they have realized that they can expect more than a solid undergraduate record and summer jobs at the local coffee shop. They can expect experience. This sets up a vicious cycle where the job applicant cannot get hired without experience but cannot get exprience without getting a job. Thus, the unpaid, often menial internship. This system undeniably favors the well-off, and these are the students who tend to fill internship spots. The numbers bear this out, according to an article by Yael Julie Fischer in Campus Progress, from earlier this year:

Most students live on a tight budget; we need cash for fun, for essentials, or for tuition. Asking us to fill our resumes by emptying our wallet seems like an awful lot to ask. A USA Today survey of unpaid interns revealed that over 60% had parents earning more than $100,000 a year. Only about 20% of all families of college students earn that much. For most students, working for free is just too expensive

In that vein, Fischer makes a worthy proposal:

Students gain a lot through internships, but they also have a lot to offer. Their skills and talents deserve recognition and there is no reason they should be exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Most employers recognize the questionable legality of unpaid internships, which is why no official statistics exist on the number of such positions. Students deserve to earn minimum wage for their work despite the glamour of the job, both because students’ skills warrant compensation and because the educational opportunity of an internship should be available to all, not just to those whose parents can bankroll them or who have the time and wherewithal to hold down other paid jobs on the side.

Universities could also ramp up their funding for the apprenticeship endeavors of their students, not that such pursuits should cut into a liberal arts education any more than they already do. Finally, I still maintain that the best education for the workforce is the liberal arts education if the student emerges with a good grasp of what s/he was taught. Of course, there are many things one learns in the workforce that cannot possibly be imparted at a university, but the ability to analyze and think critically are woefully underrated in favor of a prestigious-looking internship which may have merely involved filing and inputing data to Excel.

What is art? What is good art?

2006-12-10T15:34:00.000-05:00

I just skimmed through a book called Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture, by John Seabrook, who has written for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The book itself suffered from lack of organization and the author's over-reliance on personal anecdotes. Seabrook often tries to fit too much into his thesis, so that everything from Bill Clinton to the Helmut Lang store in New York City's SoHo neighborhood is emblematic of the "nobrow." He should have instead devoted more of this ambition to defining what nobrow culture means, which he never sufficiently does.

Nonetheless, Seabrook reintroduces a couple of challenging questions on the subject of art and what exactly it is or isn't. One question he resurrects is whether culture hierarchies are legitimate or just manifestations of upper class hegemony. My view is that, on the one hand, the old indicators that one enjoyed high culture--season tickets to the opera, patronage of the art museum, knowledge of the Western literary canon--required a certain degree of wealth. On the other hand, that which we consider high culture today has been open and accessible to the masses in the past, from orchestral concerts to Shakespeare plays. Perhaps only more recently do we categorize these performances as highbrow. Furthermore, I think judgements of quality can certainly be made about art. The process of engaging with art is intimately connected with the act of critiquing art.

Seabrook argues that this is all moot because culture today is no longer characterized by the highbrow/lowbrow duality but rather by a unified "nobrow," where what is marketable is king. To the extent that Seabrook is right about this, I believe that a new standard can be introduced to sift through the nobrow: the authenticity of the work of art. This classification may help adjudicate the argument that ensues when one side has to defend "pedestrian" tastes against another side's charges of "elitism." For instance, two music artists may be equally marketable, popular with a mass audience, and able to produce catchy music, but one artist may be eminently more authentic than the other. The latter has composed their own work where the former is produced. Using this distinction, we can discard the inauthentic--the Avril Lavignes and Britney Spears--and then go onto debate whether the authentic artists are actually good at what they do. Thus, those of us who get tarred for disliking art simply because it is popular with a mass audience can avoid such an easy charge and get to the heart of why something is or isn't good.

The endless D.C. argument

2006-12-06T23:31:00.000-05:00

Commenting of mass proportions broke out on the blog DCist yesterday over a Portland, Oregon-based band's negative review of their experience at music venue DC9 in the Shaw-U Street-Howard neighborhood. (Oh, for your own edification, if you even care, every D.C. neighborhood has at least three names kind of going on. For instance, my office is located in Federal Triangle and just south of Gallery Place-Chinatown-Penn Quarter. Oh, and not too far from Capitol Hill. Yeah. Nutty!). Anyway, here's the start of the blog entry:

A recent tip from Dave at Indiefolkforever lead us to a rather unflattering portrait of our fair city. Norfolk & Western, a Portland band that visited D.C. last month, apparently didn't have a very nice time playing DC9 or visiting the U street/Shaw neighborhood in Northwest D.C. As part of a tour journal posted on Local Cut, the
band wrote:
Washington DC proved to be a less pleasant experience for all of us. DC is not the safest city in the world to begin with, and according to my sources, the club we played at was located in a particularly bad area.

I have mixed, convoluted feelings about this band's experience, the discussion that ensued on DCist, and the larger implications of this type of discussion, all of which I will try to explain.

So anyhow, this band appears to have had a bad time in our fair city, and many commenters are taking personal offense. Really, though, who's fair city is it? Not mine. I still consider myself a Chicagoan (or Chicago suburbanite), and I'm guessing most of those commenting have only been in D.C. for a couple years at most, so let's just establish that few of us are authorities on authentic D.C. (which also happens to be an oxymoron).

Anyway, the perennial argument in D.C. ever since hipsters settled the Northwest (NW D.C., this time, not the Pacific Northwest) and continued to move East, centers around how transplants/upper and middle income/white people feel discomfort towards the "real" D.C. People who come to D.C. are viewed with a skeptical eye, with everyone from suburbanites to bands from the Pacific Northwest at risk for getting slammed for not accepting D.C. as it is. Here's one comment on that blog entry that expresses such a sentiment:

[The band's] comment [on their experience at DC9] is unfortunately typical of quite a few other people I have met from the Pacific NW, and also from other crunchy "liberal" places like Vermont and Minneapolis (where I'm from). They think they're all tolerant and progressive, but aren't comfortable with actual diversity. I'm sure they thought U Street is a particularly bad neighborhood, because like 1/2 the people on the street are black.

It is true that a lot of people habor a mental map of the District that redlines most of Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and even some of Northwest (east of 16th Street). DuPont and Georgetown are great, Adams-Morgan is fine if you stay on the main strip, and U Street is "sketchy." Seriously, someone said that last thing to me this weekend. People like that don't make it too far out of Georgetown, which is a shame, because Georgetown nightlife sucks.

Lately though, I've been thinking that it's silly to deride such people for their insulairty. For one, we're all insular to some degree, preferring to stay in places where we're comfortable. Furthermore,do hipsters really want frequenters of Georgetown bars invading U Street? U Street establishments are busy enough as it is. Still, much of the dismissive remarks made about D.C. neighborhoods are ridiculous. I've always hated the word "sketchy," part of the lexicon of the self-sheltered urban dweller because what people often mean when they apply that word is that a neighborhood is different to them, lacking in sports bars, Banana Republics, and yuppy condos.

Still, I can understand the worry about being mugged and think the derision of those who are worried about walking alone on a dark street is unfounded. Some commenters acted like the band was lucky not to get mugged:

As far as their "gang experience", sounds like the guys were just pushing their buttons. I agree it would be intimidating, but come on. They didn't get robbed or anything while they were here.

I've never gotten mugged (*big knock on wood*), but the D.C. residents who try to prove their street cred by deriding anyone who's not comfortable with the idea of winding up in a situation where they are handing their wallet to a scary man whose gun is pointed at them have either never gotten mugged either or are bloviating. No one wants to get mugged, and it should not be acceptable to get mugged. I don't care if you're in the poorest neighborhood in the city; I don't think any decent person --no matter their socio-economic situation--should be accustomed to being mugged. Too often the assumption around here is that in poor or non-white neighborhoods, crime is part of the landscape. Even if those conditions predict higher crime rates, no neighborhood prides itself on high crime, and no neighborhood wants high crime. There is this idea, not just in D.C. but all over, that urban authenticity is predicated on one's exposure to crime. It's unfortunate that crime gets elevated to a character-building experience.

Finally, and this is slightly separate from this particular incident, I get a little fed up when hipsters act as if their conception of D.C. is more authentic than anyone else's. Nothing about the modern conception of the city is authentic. For a long time, city streets were home to cesspools of waste because of inadequate sanitation systems, urban residents lived on top of each other in ramshackle dwellings, and the young and old alike labored long hours in the industrial sector with little time for leisure activities like hanging out at the local music joint. The notion that a city is a place for enlightenment and creativity is relatively recent. I always find it especially condescending when people look down on suburbanites for not living in the city and supposing it is because they are afraid of diversity and creativity. These people forget that for a long time, the American dream was to get out of the city. Only recently is the dream to move back, and it is an increasingly hard dream to attain if one's target is a city like Boston, San Francisco, New York, or even D.C. (That's why Chicago is where it's at, but anyway...).

The Most Random Group of People You'll Ever See

2006-12-05T19:08:00.000-05:00

The group of award winners at the annual Kennedy Center Honors two nights ago could not have been a more unlikely cast of characters. Capped off by George and Laura Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney, this is the Kodak Moment of the year:

From left, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Steven Spielberg, Dolly Parton, Zubin Mehta, and Smokey Robinson.

This photo could be the setup for an extreme version of the joke that begins "a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar..." Imagine the possibilities. Also, this must be the most overrated group of Kennedy Center honorees, excluding Zubin Mehta, with whom I'm not familiar, and Smokey Robinson, who is pretty awesome. Are the winners of this award usually this mediocre? I have never paid much attention to the event until this year, because it is kind of local news I guess, but really, who won in the past? Puff Daddy? Julia Roberts? Brian Grazer?

Anyway, in honor of the event, I've been listening to some classic Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and musing, as I do every six months or so, on what a disgrace to musical theater Andrew Lloyd Webber is.

Perspective from a Century of Living

2006-12-05T10:22:00.000-05:00

Today the Washington Post's Express has a feature [PDF Link] about a 104-year-old Kansan, Waldo McBurney, who still continues to work. McBurney is full of wisdom. Plus, his name is Waldo. It's nice to see coverage of someone who espouses values of humility and simplicity amidst news of excess and hunger for power. Here's McBurney:

We're living in a faster age and we think too much about money and leisure. Our morals have gone downward. There's always hope, but it's hard to see how the good is going to come.

Even though McBurney has known hard work all his life, he indicates that he lived free of the stress that characterizes modern, urban living, where we operate under the idea that productivity is the result of long hours and high pressure. Again, here's McBurney:

McBurney grew up on a farm at a time when neighbors helped neighbors without asking, when life was more about work than worry. "I expect people worry now more than then. Worry is killer," he said.

This guy couldn't be more right. However, there is one pearl of McBurney wisdom that left me a little...confused:

A lot of the poulation thinks the biggest thing they can do is kill somebody they don't agree with.

They do? I think you lost me there, Mr. McBurney.

Conversations I've had with people about Golden Oreo Cookies

2006-12-03T17:32:00.000-05:00

More conversations than you might think can be had about Nabisco's new type of Oreo Cookie, the Golden Oreo. I have instigated many. The tasty vanilla "creme filling" is better sandwiched between two rich, vanilla crackers than the standard chocolate, in my opinion. To some, this is Oreo blasphemy, but I have never much liked original Oreos (Oreoes?). The possibilities for discussion on these points are endless. Thus, I bring you, Conversations I have Had with People About Golden Oreo Cookies:

Setting: Cafeteria at work
Me: Man, I love these cookies.
Co-worker: Yeah, you say that everyday.
Me: This is my favorite moment of the day.

Setting: the Rosslyn Safeway
Store clerk: (looking down at the apples and Golden Oreo Cookies I just put on the conveyor belt) A healthy snack.
Me: Yeah, I love those things.
Store clerk: No, I didn't like them. They just weren't right. They're too original.
Me: Oh, really? Yeah, I just love the vanilla.
Store clerk: I had to give them to my mom. I had bought the Mint Oreos, Halloween Oreos, Regular Oreos, and those ones, and my cousins stayed over and ate them all except the Golden Oreos.
Me: Oh really? You should make them buy you more.
Store clerk: Well, they went back to New York. So all I had left was the Golden Oreos, so I gave them to my mom. She loved them.

See? The source of endless conversation.

Movie Review: The Candidate

2006-12-02T20:33:00.000-05:00

Michael Ritchie's 1972 film The Candidate is nothing if not prescient. An indictment of the television age and its impact on political campaigning, the film suggests that running for office makes it paradoxically difficult for the candidate to be a true public servant.

Bill McKay, played by Robert Redford, is a storefront lawyer in San Diego who helps his clients, people on the margins of society, get a leg up in the legal system. He has little influence compared to a public official, yet, McKay has no desire to run for office, even though (or because) his father (Melvyn Douglas) was once the governor of the state of California. When he is approached by a campaign operative and old schoolmate Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle), McKay is persuaded to run for U.S. Senate only on the condition that he can say what he wants and that he will lose handily.

Indeed, the incumbent Senator, Crocker Jarmin (Don Porter) holds a safe seat. A Ronald Reagan figure, Jarmin appeals to voters by upbraiding the welfare state and the federal government, though he is not adverse to calling on its resources when his popularity is at stake. He has the folksy, hard-fighting spirit of a former football star who is eminently comfortable feigning the upstanding grandpa role. He has long been unchallenged for his seat, so he is free to parrot glib platitudes that sound logical and come off as sincere.

Then, McKay comes along, and manages to sound even more sincere. When asked what he thinks about property taxes, McKay has the temerity to respond, "I don't know." He does not shy of sounding liberal at the dawn of an era when those views are becoming subject to derision and fear-mongering. Such candor invigorates his base and helps him close in on Jarmin, to everyone's surprise. Soon, his campaign managers are urging McKay to tone down the bold talk and tread lightly so he can appeal to the undecided voters, those people who may vote for McKay because he's cute, so long as he doesn't come off as too angry.

I left The Candidate with some sadness, seeing in the script the idea that the political process insurmountably removes the modern, national politician from the people s/he campaigns to represent. Upon winning the election, McKay asks Marvin Lucas "What do we do now?" One senses that the Senator-elect knows in his heart that he made more of a difference as an unambitious lawyer than he ever will as U.S. Senator. In the television age, elected national officeholders don't make news for their ideas; instead, they are there to entertain, to carry off a persona, whether it is that of a Crocker Jarmin or a Bill McKay.

Taxation with (some) representation?

2006-12-01T09:52:00.000-05:00

Will D.C. finally get the House seat it deserves? Probably not from a Republican Congress, but look for the bill to resurface next year when the Democrats are in the majority.

D.C. Mayor-elect Adrian M. Fenty went to Capitol Hill yesterday and Utah prepared to redraw its congressional districts as members of both parties said a plan to add House seats for the District and Utah had good prospects for approval next year.

P.S. What's up with the re-emergence of the fedora? Seen here on Fenty:

Movie Review: Stranger than Fiction

2006-11-29T22:11:00.000-05:00

I am a sucker for concept movies. At first viewing, I loved Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Adaptation and Memento were pretty good as well. Lest I forget Fight Club, another clever one. So it's unsurprising that I began to worry that my rave reviews relied only upon that a film have a surreal concept. Fortunately, Stranger than Fiction's failure as a concept movie proved I had inordinately worried.

The movie begins with clever computer graphics that emphasize the mundane exercises around which Will Ferrell's Harold Crick bases his life. Crick works as an auditor in the Internal Revenue Service who one day discovers that his life is actually a construct for a book written by acclaimed author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson). You've seen this man before. He was played by Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, Edward Norton in Fight Club, Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is not to mock the common theme in movies of the existential crisis provoked by meaningless work; on the contrary, it is one of the perenially ripe subjects of our age.

The problem is, Stranger than Fiction assumes that a "masterpiece"--the compliment that Dustin Hoffman's English lit professor, Jules Hilbert, bestows upon Eiffel's book--need only present a story that we already know well. Death and Taxes, as the book is called, has barely progressed before we find out that Eiffel has spent years wrestling writers block on the subject of how to kill off Crick. I am usually impressed that authors don't get writers block more often, but I find it hard to believe that a talented writer becomes inert for ten years over killing a character off. Unless the story is a murder mystery, the death seems relatively inconsequential to the larger purpose of the novel.

I wanted to love Stranger than Fiction because it is not often that a zany English professor is one of the protagonists in a film, and moreover, that he is permitted to make clever jokes that appeal to a more literate audience. Unfortunately, Professor Hilbert only came in handy in scenes that would have totally bombed without a closing pithy remark.

No one actor, even Queen Latifah in her absolutely pointless role as Eiffel's publishing company's assistant, ruined the film, though. Stranger than Fiction's problem is that its central concept rendered itself pointless. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the concept--a device that allows the lead couple to forget their turbulent relationship and (unintentionally) reunite--imparts meaning: to be careful for what you wish, to learn how to embrace or at least accept the past, painful as it sometimes is, to question the wisdom of fate if it indeed exists as a phenomenon. In Stranger than Fiction, nothing about Crick's life as product of third person omniscient narration adds meaning to the story. The movie could have easily been about a boring IRS agent who finds love in an unconventional baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and learns how to live life to its fullest, sans cool script device; however, without the gimmick it probably would not have stood out among the pack.

Generalism in a specialized world

2006-11-27T21:31:00.000-05:00

Society becomes more complex when individuals become more specialized, and individuals become more specialized when society becomes more complex. This is a truth I despair of every time I confront it, yet it is a truth. As I have said before, I have a visceral aversion to jargon, as its use deters the layperson from understanding the subject matter at hand. At the same time I understand that it is helpful for specialists to have a language with which to communicate with one another. Still, the idea of following a specialized career track, in which one learns the language of the field while moving further away from all other fields, turns me into a commitment-phobe.

And yet, there are fields that are generalist. Law and journalism are the two that come to mind. Both still require the practitioner to learn a language, though journalism's is a language of universalism. As a person who enjoys writing, I fear any stifling parameters to language, which appear in the law, such as legal jargon (too much Latin! and so forth) and a fairly strict writing format. These demands--flexibility in form of communication, generalism--do not comply with the needs of a complex society. So what is a person who wants to be both useful to society, gainfully employed, and interested in her work do?

Be cognizant of this "predicament," I say (to myself). I am in truth living among a luxury of choices. Maybe the new anomie springs from such constant consumerism, where choices are plentiful and perspective takes too much time to summon. I once asked someone several generations older than myself why he had chosen to be a doctor. "Because back then, if you wanted to go to professional school, you either went into law or medicine," he said. It was that easy. Of course, I know it was not easy: medical school is no cakewalk, but the point is, when one has few other choices, one has less room for doubt. As one of my teachers once told me (paraphrased), "the more I have learned, the less I realize that I know." Sometimes the source of paralysis is knowing too much.

Review of movie I haven't seen: Bobby

2006-11-24T20:07:00.000-05:00

I continue to feel more motivation to review movies that I have not seen than those that I have. Although I have seen a variety of films recently--The Queen, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, Jules et Jim, Network (again)--I only want to review Bobby, the movie about the second most famous Kennedy (or maybe third or fourth). Actually, Bobby is less about Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's brother and once U.S. Attorney General, than it is about the mood of the country when RFK was assassinated in 1968.

Though I am admittedly curious to see this movie, a few of its attributes worry me. First of all, "directed by Emilio Estevez" is not particularly encouraging. The Post says Estevez is "best known" as one of the "Brat Pack" actors, but among members of my generation, it's much worse: he's Coach Gordon Bombay of The Mighty Ducks and D2. He has said, "Quack, quack, quack, Mr. Duckworth!" in a movie. He is a poor man's Charlie Sheen (who happens to be his brother). Just to clarify, his dad is Martin Sheen, and he had to play a hockey coach in a stupid (but admittedly hilarious) kids movie!

Secondly, the cast aims to be an exciting ensemble and as such includes one-note actors like Helen Hunt, Lindsay Lohan, Ashton Kutcher, and Heather Graham. A film that aims to create an aura around a consequential historical figure totally does itself in if it casts Ashton Kutcher in any role, even as an extra. As for Heather Graham, I was not aware that she was still around, but she has the honor of being my least favorite actress of all time. Her over-acting ditz schtick made the sequel to Austin Powers exponentially worse than it already was, and she looks like an albino bug.

Finally, and most importantly, from all accounts, Bobby is based upon the premise that Bobby Kennedy was a good guy. That is not to say that the film is incorrect to portray him as a figure who inspired, because he did, especially in the mounting turbulence of 1968, but it adds nothing new to the popular historical picture of Bobby Kennedy, which, as tends to be the case with historical figures, is not a very multi-faceted picture. To his credit, he visited Appalachia to bring attention to the plight of the impoverished, and he became a voice of calm in the early throes of instability in Vietnam, but he was also the legislative aide to Joseph McCarthy during the opportunistic witchhunts of the late 1940s and the early 1950s, and he was, by all accounts, a ruthless operative bent on enforcing loyalty to himself and his brother. He also gave written approval to the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King, Jr., who the discredited J. Edgar Hoover suspected as a Communist, though in fairness, Kennedy also leant support to the enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education and worked hard to desegregate the government. I can certainly see how it would be interesting for a film to explore how a U.S. politician impacted the American people--I often wonder how consequential political figures are upon peoples' day-to-day experiences--but the portrayal of this oft-recounted historical moment risks bringing nothing new to the table.

Top ten Thanksgiving table conversations of 2006

2006-11-24T18:25:00.000-05:00

...And the clichés that accompanied them:

(1) the recall of O.J. Simpson's book and interview
"I wonder how those jurors feel now, acquitting a cold-blooded murderer."
"I'm glad the media finally had some sense."
"That man will do anything to make a buck."
"The poor Brown and Goldman families."

(2) the Michael Richards racist outburst
"Kramer really is crazy!"
"The media and the politically correct police are at it again, making Kramer look bad."
"He should have apologized for being an awful stand up comic while he was at it!"

(3) Wii versus PS3
"Boy, the lines are going to be long tomorrow, huh!"
"Mom, can I get a PS3/Wii/Xbox" ad infinitum
(4) College football
"It really should be Michigan versus Ohio this year in the NCAA football championship; it's too bad they're both in the Big Ten."
"Boy [fill in the blank team] sucks this year."

(5) Professional football
Nothing interesting

(6) Traveling
"It was a zoo at the airport this year!"
"I hate flying, what with the security checkpoints and the long lines."
"It was a zoo on the expressway this year!"
"I hate driving, what with the tolls and traffic."

(7) Thanksgiving food and how it makes you full
"Boy, I'm not going to be able to move after this tasty meal."
"This is the best stuffing I've ever had."
"You've outdone yourself with the pie."
"Well, I know what I'm going to be having for dinner for the next week [pause for effect] turkey!"
"Time to loosen the belt buckle a notch or two."

(8) The weather
"You missed some great weather we had last week, Aunt Bertha."
"Boy, I guess I chose the wrong week to come to Chicago. It sure is cold here!"
"Why, I think this is the most beautiful Thanksgiving we've ever had."

(9) The new Congressional majority
something that inevitably makes things awkward between guests of opposing political loyalties

(10) What the younger dinner guests are going to do after high school/college/work/graduate school
"So, you have your colleges picked out yet?"
"So, you know what you're going to do after college?"
"You're an English major: what are you planning on doing with that?"

Please feel free to comment with other typical Thanksgiving dinner conversations.

Big Pharma needs to reevaluate their priorities

2006-11-24T11:38:00.000-05:00

The Post and the Times have been covering the re-grouping of the big pharmaceutical companies' lobbying arm in Washington in reaction to the results of November's election. Big pharma is already alarmed that Democrats have promised to negotiate lower drug prices for Americans, which the Medicare Part D plan forbids. They are predicting a less friendly group of legislators while at the same time putting their energies in their big lobbying arms:

Many drug company lobbyists concede that the House is likely to pass a bill intended to drive down drug prices, but they are determined to block such legislation in the Senate. If that strategy fails, they are counting on President Bush to veto any bill that passes. With 49 Republicans in the Senate next year, the industry is confident that it can round up the 34 votes normally needed to uphold a veto.
While that showdown is a long way off, the drug companies are not wasting time. They began developing strategy last week at a meeting of the board of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

I have two thoughts after reading about such jockeying amongst the big pharma players and their allies in Congress. First, lobbying, at least in this industry (though I'm sure in others too), is not based so much on the merits of the interests that the lobbyist is representing but rather on the lobbyist's own ties with members of Congress and their staff. The Times and Post article both detail how the pharmaceutical lobbies are hiring people acquainted with members of the majority party. How much of policymaking is based on what and not who the legislator knows?

Second, lobbying sure costs a lot of money for big pharma. This is an industry that has two lobbying arms: the K street group whose targets are the Congress and the drug representatives whose targets are the physicians. Big pharma estimates that it spends 5.7 billion a year on marketing to doctors, another group estimates that 90% of the 21 billion in marketing that the companies have, or 18.9 billion is spent on marketing to physicians, a large part of that devoted to gifts large and small. The thought is of course that the physician will in turn prescribe their drug that they are hawking. Here's one physician's account of drug company "largesse":

It's gotten to the point that it's impossible not to partakeof drug-company largesse when I attend a conference. Drug companiesunderwrite many of the talks, and even the buses that move usfrom lecture to lecture at no charge carry ads for popular drugs.Sure, I'll turn down the theater tickets and box seats at sportingevents and the expensive tours, wine tastings, and meals, butit's impossible not to receive some form of freebie, howeverinadvertent.
Back at home, there's the community detailing with expensiveluncheons and dinners, mostly with lectures attached, but notalways. I receive invitations daily, and it's all free—notto mention the magazines and brochures that show up in my mail,without my having requested them. I can't tell who's been sendingthem; I wish they'd stop.
There's more too, for example, invitations to cruises, on whichI could be paid as a consultant, to discuss "how I prescribe antidepressants."I was even gifted with a pricey, inscribed Mont Blanc pen whenI became a medical director—I did not keep it—and<sup> the drug rep was upset, because who wants a pen with my name in gold?

Even if the physician makes an active effort to avoid submitting to the quid pro quo, studies have shown that gifts to physicians still have an impact on what the physician prescribes. Here's Dr. Charles Atkins' view:

Of course I'm influenced by them, I'm just not surehow much and in what ways. I have my suspicions, which are reflectedin such questions as, Why are we so quick to abandon old medicationswhen the new ones come out? If people spent the same amountof time, energy, and money extolling the virtues of off-patentmedications, would we switch so quickly?

And Dr. Stephen Cha:

Like political contributions, these gifts are not necessarily improper, and some industry-physician collaborations can lead to important advances. But research shows that such largess affects physicians' prescribing practices and may compromise their objectivity.

Certainly if I knew that my doctor was getting $5,000 to $20,000 a year from the maker of Vioxx, I would wonder why the doctor was prescribing it.

It is often argued when a patent on a drug expires, allowing the sales of a generic counterpart, or when lawmakers express a desire to negotiate with the drug companies for lower prices, or when pharmaceutical companies are urged to sell expensive HIV/AIDS drugs to poor countries, that the research & development budget of that company will be negatively impacted to the point that it cannot possibly devote the same energies that it has in the past to develodevelopingrugs. However, companies like Merck, Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb, and so forth, need to take a look in the mirror when they can spend billions on lobbying to Congress and to doctors and still defend not losing some money by getting drugs to people who need them.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-23T11:30:00.000-05:00

Hilarious Thanksgiving video from zefrank's The Show!

Marriage in France: Passé

2006-11-21T22:08:00.000-05:00

The Post featured a surprisingly complex and well-reported article today about the decline of marriage in France. Marriage rates in the Western world have been on a decline for awhile and even more in parts of Europe. The declining marriage rate in northern Europe is seen as a rejection of those institutions that promulgated marriage--the Catholic Church, the traditional family, the closed society--no more so than in France.

In 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, the marriage rate in France was 4.3 per 1,000 people, compared with 5.1 in the United Kingdom and 7.8 in the United States. The only European countries with rates lower than France's were Belgium, at 4.1, and Slovenia, with 3.3.

The knee-jerk response in some American quarters will of course be that the French are "godless," "socialist," and "relativist." However, the consequences of the marriage decline has not been chaos, broken homes, or rampant polygamy:

Contrary to predictions three decades ago, when the marital downslide began, French family social structures have not disintegrated. Instead, society has accepted and embraced changing attitudes. French law stopped distinguishing between children born in or out of wedlock more than 30 years ago.

A willingness to believe that the marriage decline stems from a dissolution of morals would be too eager to ascribe moral failings to a people, and it misses what is so fascinating about this trend: there are neither the same incentives nor influences to get married as there used to be:

The tax breaks the French government offers married couples, which are not as substantial as U.S. marriage tax reductions, are not enough to persuade most cohabitating couples to formalize their relationships. In France, the greatest financial and tax incentives target the number of children a couple has rather than the parents' marital status.

The couple that is profiled in the story did not see a reason to get married, but they have two children and have cohabitated for many years. It is tempting to compare the U.S. and France, but because of the different populations and sizes between the two countries, it would be difficult to draw conclusions . It is fair to say though that marriage in the U.S. has become a racket. When so many weddings devolve into a game of keeping up with the Jones', it's no wonder that some people would just assume avoid the game. Can a society that marvels at the "huge rock" on a woman's finger and fawns at million-dollar weddings really judge one that does not consummate as many such affairs?

Ségolène Royal, who last week won the Socialist Party nomination for president in next year's election, and Francois Hollande, the party's leader, have had four children during their 25 years of cohabitation. French Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, another possible presidential contender, has spent nearly 22 unmarried years living with Patrick Ollier, a member of the National Assembly.
"We never had time to get married," Alliot-Marie said in a recent interview. Royal has expressed distaste for the notion, once calling marriage a "bourgeois institution."

"I don't see how marriage would bring any more to our union as a couple," [Sandrine] Folet said. "It doesn't take away anything, it doesn't bring anything."

Like anything else, institutions that no longer seem functional may be deemed irrelevant. France and its neighbors may be headed towards total secularism, but that does not mean that they are valueless and rudderless.

Roundup of the Ridiculous

2006-11-20T19:55:00.000-05:00

I have never been filled with such glee.

This video is a brilliant (albeit totally unintentional) illustration of Corporate America.

Bank of America sings U2's "One"

I used to think that TV commericals that cheesed up classic rock songs were made by cynical people, but now I'm willing to believe these people are for real.

Secondly, I love Professor John Orman:

The political party formed by U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman after he lost the Democratic primary in August has a new chairman - and it's not Lieberman.

However, according to the bylaws adopted by its new chairman, Lieberman critic and Fairfield University professor John Orman, the senator is an eligible party candidate.

According to bylaws established by Orman, anyone whose last name is Lieberman may seek the party's nomination - or any critic of the senator.

Orman seized control of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party this week after registering as its sole member and electing himself as chairman.

Orman has triggered a process that will force Lieberman and state elections officials to decide the future of a party created solely to return the senator to Washington.

Cities and My Very Own D.C. Travel Guide

2006-11-19T22:35:00.000-05:00

Because I just returned from a weekend in New York City, whose land mass could probably fit 50 D.C.s, I am feeling like an inferior city-dweller. As another friend and fellow D.C. resident told me, D.C. always seems a bit of a disappointment after a weekend in New York. The truth is, the two cities cannot be compared: they are just different in their economic and therefore general composition. D.C. is furthermore just a unique city because of its preponderance of government jobs and jobs that revolve around government jobs. This of course shapes the city's character to a great degree: where an NYC or Chicago has many longstanding cultural outposts (think jazz clubs and intimate music venues), D.C. has only a few. This is because the D.C. metropolitan area has for a longtime been more a bedroom community, populated by government employees and their family. That it now vies to be a "cool" city is a newer development.

Furthermore, as a result of it having a job market centered around careers that promise greater stability than most--law, government, consulting, D.C. is a little more conservative than somewhere like NYC. That is, people in D.C. are more risk-averse (not to say NYC doesn't have this--it does, but it also is home to people with very "risky" professions such as artists). Politically, of course, D.C. is actually more liberal (or at least more Democratic-leaning) in the District and its surroundings, but culturally it's not. I had no idea that people wear leggings with flannel shirts and flats until I saw it, many times, in NYC. The celebrity sitings are cooler in NYC too. For instance, the first celebrity I saw in D.C. was Dennis Kucinich; in NYC this past weekend, I saw Michelle Williams and (I believe Heath Ledger) in Brooklyn.

So, because I need to console myself about living in a less hip, less dynamic, less urban, more conservative city--and really, I live in NoVA, which is a city-cum-suburb, I'm going to comprise a "Weekend in D.C." travel guide to prove to someone (me?) that D.C. is still...cool...right? (At least the Metro remains superior).

Just a note about the following guide: the places below to which I have not personally visited come highly recommended by others or are generally known as beloved D.C. institutions. So without further a due...

(Note: anything denoted with a $ sign costs money; anything without that notation is free!)

Friday: Museum Day

Morning

National Gallery (Metro: Archives-Navy Memorial or Smithsonian)

Lunch

Walk to U.S. Senate Cafeteria, Dirksen or Russell Building ($)

Afternoon

Air and Space Museum

Freer and Hirshorn Galleries (Metro: L'Enfant Plaza or Smithsonian)

Evening

Jazz club on U. Street or the Black Cat ($) (Metro: U Street-Cardozo)

Saturday: Monument Day

Morning

Arlington National Cemetery and Iwo Jima (Metro: Arlington Cemetery, Rosslyn)

Afternoon

White House (tour optional) (Metro: McPherson Square or Farragut West)

Old Executive Office Building

Renwick Gallery and/or Phillips Collection ($) (had to throw in a few more great art museums, esp. the Phillips) (Metro: DuPont Circle)

Dinner

Old Ebbit Grill (Metro: Metro Center)

Evening

Walk from Old Ebbit Grill to the Washington Monument, World War II Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, and Korean War Memorial (in my opinion, doing the memorials in the evening makes them all the more striking)

Sunday: D.C. Neighborhood day

Morning

Eastern Market: visit the market on 7th and North Carolina, stop for coffee at one of the nearby coffee shops, like Murky Coffee, and at Capitol Hill Books, then walk East on North Carolina to Lincoln Park (Metro: Eastern Market)

Afternoon and Evening

Dupont Circle, Kalorama, Georgetown: in Dupont, stop by Kramer Books, then walk up Connecticut Ave. until Kalorama Road, where there are beautiful homes (Metro: DuPont Circle)

Evening

Kennedy Center concert ($) (Metro: Foggy Bottom)

Please comment, take issue with, or offer suggestions to this itinerary. It is certainly a work in progress and furthermore reflects my own personal tastes, which tend towards art viewing and neighborhood exploring. Oh, and I definitely could use more restaurant suggestions. The D.C. restaurant scene is a little too lobbyist-oriented for me to be able to justify becoming an afficiando (i.e., I could not handle the expense).

Democrats ready to focus on Americans' economic concerns

2006-11-19T09:22:00.000-05:00

This couldn't be better news. If anyone doubted that we'd see much of a difference from Washington, D.C., with a Democratic majority, you need not worry:

Striving for a few quick legislative victories in January and longer-term goals whose details -- and viability -- are not yet certain, Democratic lawmakers want to shift the dialogue on Capitol Hill to workers' pay, college tuition, health-care costs, retirees' income and other issues that touch ordinary families.

...Still, key Democrats interviewed in recent days portrayed their strategy as an attempt to do several things at once: distinguish themselves from the outgoing Republican majority, heed voters' messages from the midterm elections and lay groundwork for the 2008 presidential campaign, in which they predict the widening income gap in the United States will be a prominent theme.

As it should be. Can we lay to rest the notion that this is a conservative Democratic congress already?

But if this happens...

Their success is not assured. Democrats will hold a tenuous 51 to 49 majority in the Senate, where Republicans and the Bush administration will be well-positioned to thwart their legislation,

more of them should just be voted out.

Inevitably, the subject is now 2008...

2006-11-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

...even though, it is not worth devoting much space to in the newspapers, simply because our country has more immediate priorities. My own thoughts on how Democrats should decide who runs for president in '08 are best summed up by Chris Bowers:

Nothing saddens me more then when I see people in the netroots trying to play Washington insider. When I see netroots activists talking about which vice-presidential candidate someone should choose in order to better scam certain national demographic groups into voting for the Democratic ticket, it really bums me out. Whenever I see netroots activists declaring their support for a candidate based on his or her "electability," it really bums me out. Whenever I see netroots activists deeming candidate X or candidate Y "un-electable" for one of the many clichéd and utterly discredited reasons that the established has always used to deem candidates unelectable ("doesn't play in the heartland," "too liberal," "can't swing the South or the border states," "not enough military credentials") I almost start shaking with rage. Since when did we become the same losers we are trying to replace via the silent revolution?

What Democrats need in 2008 is a candidate who can truly inspire people. That is the only way we are going to achieve the transformation that the progressive movement promises. It is not going to be done through narrow targeting.

In an age of narrow targeting, where our country is "sliced and diced" by pollsters and pundits--as Barack Obama put it in 2004--in order to find the perfect candidate, the candidate is discouraged from being bold. The most compelling candidates I have seen, Obama, Clinton (probably Reagan, though I was only a semi-cognizant being when he was presdent) are good at looking at the big picture and trying to draw out a few anxieties that speak to the broad American experience and respond to those anxieties with a few ideas. Hillary Clinton should not remover herself from the race because she's a woman, nor should Obama remove himself because he is half black or because he will not have served a full U.S. Senate term by 2008. Either candidate should remove her/himself if s/he starts narrowly defining issues, persisting to appeal to a political "center" that probably does not exist, or targeting a few states and regions to eke out just enough votes to win the electoral college map.