Sunday, May 19, 2013

Sunday Reading

Obstruction — Jonathan Bernstein at Salon on why blocking every move by the president will blow up in the hands of the GOP.

It’s obvious that the unprecedented Senate Republican obstruction of executive branch nominations is bad for the president; it’s bad for the smooth functioning of the government; and it’s bad for voters who elected a Democratic president and a solid, 55-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. I’ve argued, too, that it’s bad for the Senate.

Less obvious? It’s bad for Republicans.

Now, in electoral terms, it can’t be bad for both parties, since electoral politics is a zero-sum game. Indeed, that’s sort of the problem for Republicans; obstruction of these nominations almost certainly has zero electoral effect. After all, most voters couldn’t tell you who the nominees for secretary of labor or to head the Environmental Protection Agency are, let alone the obscure rules Republicans are using to delay their confirmation.

So the effects of massive, across-the-board obstruction are going to be on policy, not elections. And that’s not a zero-sum game – and it will hurt Republicans and Republican-aligned groups, too.

Obstruction backfires against Republicans because it makes it difficult, and perhaps impossible, for them to collectively use the nomination process to make policy demands. Consider, for example, what they’ve done with EPA nominee Gina McCarthy. Senators traditionally ask nominees questions in order, in part, to get them to commit to policies those Senators find acceptable. McCarthy received not the normal dozens of questions, but more than 1,000. That appears to be an extreme case, but it’s not just her, either. As the New York Times reported, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had to answer 395. By contrast, George W. Bush’s last Treasury Secretary received 49 questions from Democrats and 32 from Republicans. When you answer hundreds of questions, you might as well answer none; by failing to focus on specific areas of policy they care about, Republicans are likely wasting the opportunity to actually win some policy commitments.

Which Was the Worst? — James Fallows at The Atlantic weighs in on which of the so-called scandals is the one that could be the worst for President Obama.

Obama’s endorsement of the seizure of phone records and investigation suggests surprising blindness to two great and not-very-hidden realities of presidential history.

One is, secrets always get out. Presidents always hate it, and they always do their best to prevent it. Usually they manage to guard the truly life-and-death, real-time operational details — for instance, in Obama’s case, the suspected whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. But always there are leaks. Always. Always. And they are nearly always less consequential than is alleged at the time.

The other great historical constant is that after-the-fact hunts for leakers always go wrong. That is because they criminalize the delicate but essential relationship between reporters and government officials. The prosecutors always come across as over-reaching and too intrusive. The reporters and their news organizations always end up in a no-win situation: sometimes spending time in jail, often put in financial distress by legal costs, always torn between their professional/personal obligation to maintain confidence with their sources and the demands of prosecutors. And no good purpose is ever served.

Obama should know this. He must know it. He must know that no president looks better in history’s eyes for anti-leak prosecutions, and that many look worse. He must know the temptations that work on any president: the temptation to steadily arrogate executive power, to become so resentful of the limits on his power in domestic-legislation fights that he is drawn toward his untrammeled international authority, to slide imperceptibly from his (unavoidable) role as the person who must make countless hard decisions to a sense that his judgment automatically equals what is best for the country. He must know what the open-ended “war on terror” has done to the balance of powers, the fabric of life, and the rule of law in our country. Obama’s (and America’s) ideal, Abraham Lincoln, infringed heavily on civil liberties in the name of wartime emergency. That war, like Franklin Roosevelt’s, had a definable end.

I think Barack Obama has made a bad mistake in endorsing this investigation. It is one of the rare times I question not his effectiveness or tactics but his judgment. I hope he reconsiders.

Pity Party — Frank Bruni says that winning in America, be it on The Voice or in politics, relies on having a hard-luck story to tug at the heartstrings.

There’s a vivid streak of this in history, from Abe Lincoln’s log home to Bill Clinton’s turbulent one. But it seems more florid now. The economy’s stubborn funk has ratcheted up our suspicion of perks and privileges and our support for underdogs, to a point where we’re less taken with what people have achieved than with what they’ve endured.

In politics and in prime time, the contestants with the most traction are frequently the contestants with the gravest trials: afflictions, addictions, lost loves, lost dogs. I’m kidding about the canines, but only slightly. If there aren’t any epic setbacks in your biography, your political consultants or your “Voice” producers will find and amplify whatever garden-variety sorrows do exist. They’re like divining rods for tears, Yo-Yo Ma’s of the heartstrings.

That’s surely why a sort of weariness and skepticism was the response among a few New Yorkers I know to last week’s revelations by Christine Quinn, the mayoral candidate, that she’d struggled with bulimia and alcoholism. They’ve grown so inured to the process of public figures rummaging through the past for hard knocks that they greet it in a jaded fashion, wondering how to tell the real aches from the exaggerated ones.

Fetishized misfortune — hardship porn — has numbed them. That’s the biggest problem with it. It equates and mashes everything into one sentimental mush, cheapening uncommon suffering by showcasing it alongside the rest. It bends all life stories into identical arcs, no matter how different those stories are.

Doonesbury — Facial recognition.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Sunday Reading

Not the First — Long before Jason Collins came out, there was Glenn Burke. Allen Barra in The Atlantic tells the story of the first major league out gay baseball player.

A few months back, the Baltimore Ravens’ Brendon Ayanbadejo, an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights, told USA Today that he thought the first player in the three major sports to out himself would be a baseball player: “The religious roots are a lot deeper in basketball and football. With that being said, I think baseball players are more open-minded.”

What Ayanbadejo didn’t know was that one baseball player already had. This week’s coming out by NBA player Jason Collins is momentous, but the Jackie Robinson of gay rights was Glenn Burke, who played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland A’s from 1976 to 1979. He tried to change sports culture three decades ago—but back then, unlike now, sports culture wasn’t ready for a change.

Burke made no secret of his sexual orientation to the Dodgers front office, his teammates, or friends in either league. He also talked freely with sportswriters, though all of them ended up shaking their heads and telling him they couldn’t write that in their papers. Burke was so open about his sexuality that the Dodgers tried to talk him into participating in a sham marriage. (He wrote in his autobiography that the team offered him $75,000 to go along with the ruse.) He refused. In a bit of irony that would seem farcical if it wasn’t so tragic, one of the Dodgers who tried to talk Burke into getting “married,” was his manager, Tommy Lasorda, whose son Tom Jr. died from AIDS complications in 1991. To this day, Lasorda Sr. refuses to acknowledge his son’s homosexuality.

Burke, who also died of AIDS-related causes in 1995, came out to the world outside baseball in a 1982 article for Inside Sports and even followed it up shortly after with an appearance on The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. But his story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke’s former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, Out at Home, which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.

He told People magazine while promoting his book in 1995, “My mission as a gay ballplayer was the breaking of a stereotype … I think it worked … They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it.”

And yet Burke is remembered less today as a pioneer for gay rights and more as the man who, along with Dusty Baker, invented the “high five.”

The media in general and the sports media in particular found Burke’s homosexuality an inconvenient truth. He told People, “I think everyone just pretended not to hear me. It just wasn’t a story they were ready to hear.”

Eighteen years later they still haven’t heard him.

It’s His Problem — Andrew O’Hehir on President Obama’s cowardice at Gitmo.

So it is that Obama, more than four years after signing an executive order to shut down the Guantánamo prison, found himself a few days ago mumbling defensively to the White House press corps that it might be time to “re-engage with Congress” on the issue. “It is not a surprise to me that we’ve got problems in Guantánamo,” he added. Well, it freakin’ well shouldn’t be, Mr. President. From the moment Obama became a presidential candidate in 2007, he campaigned vigorously against Guantánamo as a pillar of the flawed and failed Bush-Cheney war policy. He won the election and signed that executive order in his third day on the job, and then – once it became clear that House Republicans would be delighted to use the issue to depict him as a crypto-Muslim, terrorist-coddling pantywaist – let the whole thing drop. The rest of us, I’m afraid, mostly assumed that the right guy was in office and the right thing would be done eventually, and moved on.

But decisions made in the name of political expediency have a tendency to come back and bite you in the ass. (If Machiavelli never said that, he should have.) As the Economist put it this week, the current hunger strike at Guantánamo, which began as a small dissent movement in February and now includes most of the camp’s detainees, has shamed Obama and forced America and the world to face “one of his most glaring failures.” Military officials admit that 100 of the 166 Guantánamo prisoners are now refusing food, while lawyers and activists in contact with the detainees say the real number is closer to 130. At least 23 men in the camp are reportedly being strapped into a chair twice a day and force-fed Ensure nutritional supplement — through a plastic tube passed through the nose and into the stomach – in order to keep them alive. Three to five others in more serious condition have apparently been hospitalized. (The Miami Herald has an online chart showing the progress of the strike, using the official statistics.)

How many of these detainees, who’ve decided they’d rather die than face indefinite imprisonment with no prospect of either release or trial, are dedicated al-Qaida extremists? It’s obviously a loaded question, and I suppose the real answer is that no one knows. But here’s what we do know: Of the 166 prisoners still at Guantánamo, 86 have been officially cleared for release, either to their home countries or somewhere else. In fact, many of those were designated for release years ago, under the Bush administration, and they are still locked up. There’s nothing close to an adequate explanation for that fact, but we can evidently blame a combination of bureaucratic inertia, excessive caution and the fact that almost no one gives a crap about a few dozen Arab and/or Muslim men who used to be suspected terrorists and now constitute a national embarrassment.

They Ain’t Cheap — Andy Borowitz reports on the N.R.A’s budget woes.

National Rifle Association C.E.O. Wayne LaPierre used his opening speech at the N.R.A.’s national convention today to highlight several challenges facing the organization, including what he called “the rising cost of Senators.”

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen the price of purchasing a Senator surge astronomically,” he told the N.R.A. faithful. “Unless something is done to make Senators more affordable, the ability of a tiny lobbying group to overrule the wishes of ninety per cent of the American people will be in jeopardy.”

The days are over, he said, when “you could buy a Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for little more than pocket change.”

“Now it costs thousands to purchase a marginally effective Senator like Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.),” he said.

Mr. LaPierre was followed at the podium by the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the rock musician Ted Nugent, and several other people who would not pass background checks.

Doonesbury — Grade deflation.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Sunday Reading

Beating Back the Bush — The Sunday chat shows will probably have a few defenders of former President George W. Bush. Here’s the counterpoints from Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon:

Every dog goes to heaven and every former president should get a shot at repairing his legacy, especially when it’s as tattered as George W. Bush’s. With the opening of his presidential library and museum this week, observers from former Bush officials to mainstream outlets were taking a fresh, rosy look at the Bush legacy. Some offered dopey and facially ridiculous cheerleading, while others offered more compelling suggestions to return to the Bush era with an open mind. After all, other presidents left office in a cloud only to be redeemed by history years later.

So, is this week making you feel a bit nostalgic for the Bush era? Don’t. It’s been almost half a decade since the 43rd president left office, and he’s looking as bad as ever. Of course, that won’t stop a small circle of admirers (many of whom used to be on his payroll) from trying, so here’s your guide to taking on the five biggest specious pro-Bush talking points put forward this week:

1) Bush kept us safe: The biggest myth of the Bush presidency, by far, is that the president kept the country safe. As Charles Krauthammer wrote this week in the Washington Post in a typical example: “It’s important to note that he did not just keep us safe. He created the entire anti-terror infrastructure that continues to keep us safe … Which is why there was not one successful terror bombing on U.S. soil from 9/11 until last week.”

Just no. First of all, why does 9/11 not count? It’s not like the U.S. government was completely unaware of the threat from al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden until 9/11. After all, bin Laden had already helped orchestrate the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds in 1998, and Bill Clinton launched cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan to try to kill bin Laden three years before 9/11. And then there’s that CIA briefing that warned Bush: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” — 36 days before Sept. 11. Bush’s response to the briefer giving him the news? To say, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” Then he went fishing. Literally.

As for the claim that there were no terror attacks on U.S. soil after 9/11 under Bush — also bogus. Conor Friedersdorf writes:

“Bush’s tenure included anthrax attacks that killed five people (more than died in the Boston marathon bombing) and that injured between 22 and 68 people. Bush was president when Hesham Mohamed Hadayet killed two and wounded four at an LAX ticket counter; when the Beltway snipers killed 10 people; when Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar injured six driving his SUV into a crowd; and when Naveed Afzal Haq killed one woman and shot five others in Seattle.”

Also, there was the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, just before the 2000 election, which should have brought an extra warning about the al-Qaida threat, and later on, bombings in London, Madrid, and Jordan. Meanwhile, thanks to the wars there, much of the attention from international terror went to Iraq and Afghanistan, where al-Qaida and sympathetic groups found it easier to kill American soldiers than to attack Americans on U.S. soil.

There are more, including the howler that Bush was fiscally responsible, and the most egregious one of all: “Iraq wasn’t that bad.”

The Deportation Machine — William Finnegan in The New Yorker on how undocumented workers are treated when they are caught.

You get arrested. The authorities run a background check. They need to know if you have outstanding warrants or unpaid tickets, if you jumped bail somewhere, if you’re driving a stolen vehicle. To obtain your criminal history, they routinely send your fingerprints to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which keeps a database of more than a hundred million prints. The F.B.I., under a federal program known as Secure Communities, will share your fingerprints with the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security’s core job—the reason it was created—is to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States. Your prints might reveal that you’re a suspected terrorist. D.H.S. is also charged with border security. Its Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm, ICE, will run your prints through the D.H.S. database—specifically, its U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology Program (U.S.-VISIT) and Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), which also contain more than a hundred million prints—searching for a match with people wanted for immigration violations. If a match occurs, ICE can issue a “detainer.” Now the local authorities, before they release you, may notify ICE, which may elect to transfer you to federal custody in order to begin deportation proceedings.

Florida Ethics — No, really. Carl Hiaasen has the scoop.

Promise not to laugh?

An ethics bill was passed last week in Tallahassee.

It’s no joke. The Legislature unanimously approved a law designed to clean up its own sketchy act, and that of elected officials all over the state.

Gov. Rick Scott says he’s “reviewing” the bill. To veto it would be an act of profound cluelessness, but remember who we’re talking about.

The ethics legislation is significant because the concept of enforcing ethical behavior is so foreign to Florida politics. Decades of well-publicized misdeeds and flagrant conflicts of interest have failed to make a moral dent.

A few years ago, lawmakers went through the motions of establishing something called a Commission on Ethics. Most Floridians were unaware of its existence, for good reason. It was a total sham.

Doonesbury — The perpetual question.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Sunday Reading

Stop Watching the News — Farhad Manjoo offers a respite from the breaking news.

Inspired by the events of the past week, here’s a handy guide for anyone looking to figure out what exactly is going on during a breaking news event. When you first hear about a big story in progress, run to your television. Make sure it’s securely turned off.

Next, pull out your phone, delete your Twitter app, shut off your email, and perhaps cancel your service plan. Unplug your PC.

Now go outside and take a walk for an hour or two. Maybe find a park and sit on a bench, reading an old novel. Winter is just half a year away—have you started cleaning out your rain gutters? This might be a good time to start. Whatever you do, remember to stay hydrated. Have a sensible dinner. Get a good night’s rest. In the morning, don’t rush out of bed. Take in the birdsong. Brew a pot of coffee.

Finally, load up your favorite newspaper’s home page. Spend about 10 minutes reading a couple of in-depth news stories about the events of the day. And that’s it: You’ve now caught up with all your friends who spent the past day and a half going out of their minds following cable and Twitter. In fact, you’re now better informed than they are, because during your self-imposed exile from the news, you didn’t stumble into the many cul-de-sacs and dark alleys of misinformation that consumed their lives. You’re less frazzled, better rested, and your rain gutters are clear.

[...]

We get stories much faster than we can make sense of them, informed by cellphone pictures and eyewitnesses found on social networks and dubious official sources like police scanner streams. Real life moves much slower than these technologies. There’s a gap between facts and comprehension, between finding some pictures online and making sense of how they fit into a story. What ends up filling that gap is speculation. On both Twitter and cable, people are mostly just collecting little factoids and thinking aloud about various possibilities. They’re just shooting the shit, and the excrement ends up flying everywhere and hitting innocent targets.

For a lot of people, it’s exciting to get caught up in a fast-breaking story. I’d like to tell you that the next time something big breaks, I’ll stay away from Twitter. I hope that I do. But I worry that’s just my news hangover talking. For all the blind alleys, I do have a lot of fun following the news in real time, and I find it hard to stay away. Maybe you do, too. If you’re that sort of person, feel free to stay glued to Twitter and cable. Just be sure to exercise caution about what you tweet and retweet—after last night, I know I’ll be able to do at least that much. And just remember, for all the time you spend online, you won’t be any better informed than a guy who spent all day cleaning his gutters.

A Balanced Approach to Fear — Zachary Karabell at The Atlantic looks at how America reacts to mass destruction.

In the reaction to the Boston bombings, we are seeing, at least for now, an outburst of balanced outrage. I lived in Boston for seven years in the 1990s. It was a tough place — not threatening, just tough. Removed from the years of busing that had brought out the us-versus-them worst, it wasn’t yet as gentrified and reborn after the multibillion-dollar Big Dig. The DNA of cities takes a while to change, and you could feel in the many reactions from Bostonians that they were hurt, angry, and determined to catch whoever did it. But they were equally determined to keep going without making too many compromises about their lives. The city was shut down on Friday to make it easier for law enforcement to do their job, but for a very specific reason, not some generalized fear.

It’s been said for years that we have ample tools via law enforcement agencies to guard against attacks and pursue those who undertake them. The Boston response is classic law enforcement, with the FBI leading the way, the police doing the vital work, and untold numbers of volunteers and responders adding to the mix.

Terror is not an act per se; it’s the creation of fear via an act. It’s been said that Russia is relatively immune to terror, even after a number of gruesome and far more lethal episodes in recent years. In 2004, a school in Beslan was seized by Chechen fighters. When Russian troops stormed the school, nearly 400 people died. Yet that had little discernible impact on Russian attitudes or behavior. Russians are largely impervious to the effects of terror attacks because they don’t expect perfect security. They expect a world fraught with peril, and probably too much, though their history suggests that peril is the norm. Hence random acts of terror don’t terrorize.

For the Birds — Brian Kimmerling on what birds tell us about the world we live in.

A bird-watcher is a kind of pious predator. To see a new bird is to capture it, metaphorically, and a rare bird or an F.O.Y. (First of the Year, for the uninitiated) is a kind of trophy. A list of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century form of a votive offering. It’s unclear what deity presides.

There was prestige in knowing birds in ancient Rome, and there is prestige today. There are also competitive insect enthusiasts and tree connoisseurs and fungus aficionados, but they lack the cultural stature and sheer numbers of bird-watchers. There are 5.8 million bird-watchers in the United States, slightly more than the number of Americans in book clubs or residents of Wisconsin. That’s a huge army of primitive hunter-mystics decked out in sturdy hiking boots and nylon rain gear, consulting their smartphones to identify or imitate a particular quarry.

There is nothing especially new about them except for their gear. Two hundred years ago the heartland teemed with second sons of wealthy European families who could have stayed home dissipating in traditional style, but chose to go to the New World and find a new animal instead. Reporting your sightings to the Audubon Society is decidedly less glamorous than dispatching a new specimen to a museum in Paris or London, but it’s a kindred enterprise.

Today’s birders are not exploring new territory geographically, as the early naturalists did; rather, they are contouring the frontiers of climate change. It’s April, and the kitchen-window bird observer is limbering up, too. Are the birds nesting early, nesting late? (Do they know something we don’t?) The reporting such observers do is crucial.

And what are today’s birds telling us? The Audubon Society estimates that nearly 60 percent of 305 bird species found in North America in winter are shifting northward and to higher elevations in response to climate change. For comparison, imagine the inhabitants of 30 states — using state residence as a proxy for species of American human — becoming disgruntled with forest fires and drought and severe weather events, and seeking out suitable new habitat.

The Audubon Society’s estimates rest largely on data supplied by volunteers in citizen-science projects like the Christmas Bird Count (first proposed in 1900, nine years after the first known use of the word “bird-watcher,” to set the hobby apart from the more traditional Christmas pastime of shooting birds). The birds in question have shifted an average of 35 miles north over a period of about 40 years — seemingly insignificant in human terms, but a major move ecologically.

[Ed. note: I still have my well-worn, well-used copy of Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds from 1962.]

Doonesbury — Social media is the enemy.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Sunday Reading

Why Americans Are So Ignorant — Lawrence Davidson looks into the reasons, and it goes beyond Fox News.

In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble.

Shenkman spent 256 pages documenting these claims, using a great number of polls and surveys from very reputable sources. Indeed, in the end it is hard to argue with his data. So, what can we say about this?

One thing that can be said is that this is not an abnormal state of affairs. As has been suggested in prior analyses, ignorance of non-local affairs (often leading to inaccurate assumptions, passive acceptance of authority, and illogical actions) is, in fact, a default position for any population.

To put it another way, the majority of any population will pay little or no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions.

The primary issue is “does it impact my life?” If it does, people will pay attention. If it appears not to, they won’t pay attention.

[...]

It may very well be that (consciously or unconsciously) societies organize themselves to hold critical thinking to a minimum. That means to tolerate it to the point needed to get through day-to-day existence and to tackle those aspects of one’s profession that might require narrowly focused critical thought.

But beyond that, we get into dangerous, de-stabilizing waters. Societies, be they democratic or not, are not going to encourage critical thinking about prevailing ideologies or government policies. And, if it is the case that most people don’t think of anything critically unless it falls into that local arena in which their lives are lived out, all the better.

Under such conditions people can be relied upon to stay passive about events outside their local venue until the government decides it is time to rouse them up in some propagandistic manner.

How The NRA Got What It Wanted — Blake Zeff reports in Salon that Wayne LaPierre could get the last laugh.

It’s hard to remember now, but in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., this country seemed serious about gun safety reform. President Obama visited the community and tearfully invoked Scripture and vowed real action. Hunting enthusiast and senator Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) suggested he’d consider supporting an assault weapons ban. And National Rifle Association foe Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) called the organization “enablers of mass murderers” and vowed to wage war on it — and few rushed to its defense.

Then, somehow, things seemed to get even worse for the NRA. After a full week of silence after the tragedy, it held a press conference in Washington, D.C., in which its leader, Wayne LaPierre, inspired laughter and ridicule by supporting zero reforms to guns, aside from a call for more of them (arm teachers!).

But for all the mockery LaPierre’s speech elicited (and maybe even deserved), history may well show it to be a canny political maneuver. By effectively shifting the conversation far to the right, he also shifted rightward what constituted a “compromise” in the gun discussion. And ultimately, against all odds, his organization would emerge with a deal it could more than live with — in fact, one it had once publicly proposed, itself.

In other words, it is Wayne LaPierre who will get the last laugh.

The first thing to remember when it comes to the NRA and its goals is that — despite its carefully cultivated image as a hobbyist group for hunters and sportsmen — it’s far more like a trade or lobbying group for gun manufacturers. It’s the gun companies, after all, who largely fund the group. This is relevant because the imperatives of weapons producers are different from those of consumers. While polls show that gun owners — and even members of the NRA – are willing to support certain restrictions on gun ownership, these are not the opinions that matter. If the manufacturers (i.e., the funders of the group) will stand to lose massive profits from a given initiative, logic dictates that averting said measure will be fought by the NRA with brute force.

This is why bans on merchandise like assault weapons and high-capacity magazines will always be opposed so intensely by the NRA (though, in fairness, there are many gun owners who share the group’s vim in opposing these measures). It’s difficult to estimate just how much gun manufacturers stand to lose by having to stop manufacturing a chunk of their catalogue, but it’s self-evident to assume the number is not negligible.

It’s Not Just For Wizards Anymore — Turning Quidditch into a real sport. Raya Jalabi of The Atlantic has the story. (Now if they were to play it at Sunlife Stadium, I’d vote for it.)

“I’ve had my shoulder thrown out from an illegal tackle. I’ve had my lips busted open more times than I can count. I had a concussion earlier this year and I spent my first week of senior year with a black eye from a broomstick… It’s certainly not for the faint of heart.”

Amanda Dallas, a student at New York University, isn’t talking about rugby or dodgeball or even high-risk housekeeping. She’s talking about Quidditch, the sport of choice for wizards and witches in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Dallas recounted her history of Quidditch-related injuries on the way to Kissimmee, Florida, where she’ll compete this weekend with her college intramural team, the NYU Nundu, in the Muggle Quidditch World Cup VI, the highlight of the Muggle Quidditch year. She, like an estimated 1,500 other college-age players along with 12,000 spectators from around the world, will descend upon Kissimmee with broomsticks and gusto, ready for the sixth installment of the magical athletic tournament.

In the fictional boy-wizard bildungsroman, Quidditch is described as “an extremely rough but very popular semi-contact sport, played by wizards and witches around the world.” In the muggle (or non-magical) realm, Quidditch has strived to stay close to its fictional conception. Athletes play the game with one hand firmly gripping a broomstick, itself comfortably nested between the player’s legs.

Most of the novelized characteristics of the game have stayed intact: There are seven people per team, three elevated hoops that act as goalposts, quaffles (volleyball-like balls, thrown through the hoops to score points), bludgers (kickball-like balls used to hit opponents with), and, of course, a golden snitch. In J.K. Rowling’s original, the snitch was a tiny self-propelled golden ball with wings that darted around until a team’s “seeker” captured it, thus ending the game. But in Muggle Quidditch, the snitch is a person, dressed in yellow, who has a tennis-ball tail. To end the game in real-world terms means to capture the snitch’s tail.

Quidditch is more than a whimsical expression of fandom, though. It’s an amalgam of different sports, from dodgeball to basketball to rugby and more, with more than 700 rules laid out in a 172-page manual. Hundreds of teams have popped up across the globe, 300 of which are officially-recognized members of the governing body, the International Quidditch Association. Thousands of college-age plus students clamber to participate. And many of those participants would like to see the game, which has only been around since 2005, achieve some sort of legitimacy as a sport in its own right.

Doonesbury — Their good name.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Sunday Reading

Did You Hear the One About the North Korean…? Why do we mock North Korea but take Iran’s threats seriously? Julian Hattem at The Atlantic looks into it.

A man starves his own people and threatens to start a nuclear war, and Americans laugh. What a bizarre thing to do.

Meanwhile, we shirk in fear at the unhinged other leg of former President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” tripod: Iran. Unlike North Korea, we treat Iran as a legitimate threat. In Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s full-day confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the word “Iran” was mentioned more than 170 times. “North Korea” was mentioned 10. During the foreign policy-focused debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney last October, Iran came up nearly 50 times, and was the subject of multiple questions. North Korea was mentioned just once, as part of a series of other challenges facing the U.S., in the same breath as the trade deficit with China.

It’s not that Americans like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or don’t actively consider the hermit state a threat. It’s actually the country’s second least-favored , right after Iran, and equal numbers call North Korean and Iranian developments of nuclear weapons a “critical threat.” Of course, North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn’t. One might think that the country with a bomb – with whom we are still technically at war, no less — would be more of a threat than the country without one, but at least judging by the way we talk about them, that’s not the case. Why do we consider North Korea to be such a joke?

Partly it’s the way they present themselves. North Korea is a relatively small nation with leaders who come across as stereotypically incompetent Bond villains: uniformly dressed, tasteless but expensive cliché obsessions, physically unintimidating, with every major attack blowing up in their face like Wile E. Coyote. The Kim family does not produce tall or physically gifted men, nor exceptionally handsome ones. They are also Asian, which connotes a whole set of racist stereotypes, none of them necessarily terror-inspiring. Iran, meanwhile, is a Muslim nation, and for obvious but unfortunate reasons it’s easier to stoke public fears of Muslim fanaticism than Northeast Asian nationalism.

We also know less about the D.P.R.K. and Kim Jong Un. Basic details about his age (probably 30), marital status (he’s been seen around with a pretty girl , probably his wife) and children (he may have just had a kid) have only recently become clear. His nuclear policy is even murkier. When the senior Kim died in late 2011, Korea-watchers were hopeful that the country might be entering a new age of governance, maybe under a coalition of leaders who would exert unseen pressure on Kim to open the country more. That didn’t happen, obviously. Still, though, we don’t quite know what to expect from Kim, who has at least inherited his father’s inscrutability. “Nobody knows what he has planned, what he is thinking or contemplating doing or why the North Koreans are tripling down on their rhetoric,” an unnamed senior administration official told CNN last month.

The Pecker Contest — Adam Gopnik looks into our gun fetish.

And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power. The attempts to use the sort of logic that helped end cigarette smoking don’t quite work, because the “smokers” in this case feel something less tangible and yet more valued than their own health is at stake. As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, “Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. …I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.”

It’s true. Everyone, men especially, needs ego-accessories, and they are most often irrationally chosen. Middle-aged stockbrokers in New York collect Stratocasters and Telecasters they’ll never play; Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld own more cars than they can drive. Wine cellars fill up with wine that will never be drunk. The propaganda for guns and the identification of gun violence with masculinity is so overpoweringly strong in our culture that it is indeed hard to ask those who already feel disempowered to resist their allure. If we asked all those middle-aged bankers to put away their Strats—an activity that their next-door neighbors would bless—they would be indignant. It’s not about music; it’s about me, they would say, and my right to own a thing that makes me happy. And so with guns. Dan Baum, for instance, has an interesting new book out, “Gun Guys: A Road Trip.” His subjects, those gun guys, are portrayed sympathetically—they are sympathetic—and one gets their indignation at what they see as their “warrior ethic” being treated with contempt by non-gun guys. (That’s, at least, how they experience it, though where it matters, in Congressional votes, there is little but deference.) As Baum points out, gun laws are loose in America because that’s the way most Americans want it, or them.

But though you’ve got to empathize before you can understand, understanding doesn’t entail acceptance. Slavery, polygamy, female circumcision—all these things played a vital role at one time or another in somebody’s sense of the full expression of who they are. We struggle to understand our own behavior in order to alter it: everything evil that has ever been done on earth was once a precious part of somebody’s culture, including our own.

Travels with Sadie — Joan Walsh channels John Steinbeck.

I reached a new level of eccentricity this year, though, when I decided to move to New York for a few months when my book came out. After United’s poorly named PetSafe program screwed up every aspect of ferrying Sadie from San Francisco to New York (you can read the details here; I never got a reply from United — classy, huh?), I realized I would never put her in cargo again. I paid some wonderful people to drive her back to San Francisco when I came home at Christmas time (yes, I’m aware of how crazy that sounds as I type it.) So when I decided to return to New York and spend a few more months there this spring, timed to when my paperback comes out from Touchstone/Simon and Schuster April 16, I saw only one choice: I would drive, with Sadie, myself.

So I’m getting in my little Honda this morning with a dog bed in the back with a new safety-belt harness that she’ll probably wear only a few hundred miles. I’m reversing a journey I made 28 years ago, a young person, moving from Chicago to Oakland to become the California Bureau chief of In These Times, a job I made up and sold to my boss. I was pretty pleased with myself zooming across Interstate 80. Now I’m a not-young person figuring out what comes next, shuttling between coasts.

It will also be the first time in 28 years I’ll visit some of the bright red states I write about with disappointment, but have no real experience of. I’ve lived in only blue states with a purplish tinge: New York, California, Wisconsin, Illinois. I’m not going to pretend I’ll understand exactly why Nevada Sen. Harry Reid is still so beholden to the NRA by getting outside Clark County; or why there’s only one abortion clinic in Wyoming by driving through the bottom of the state; or why Nebraska replaced the most conservative Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson with conservative Republican Deb Fischer. But I’ll talk to people and read local papers and listen to local radio and I’m sure to learn something I don’t know as I sit writing this morning. There is nothing more American than driving across country and having to take in how big this land is, how diverse it is, in every way.

And I wouldn’t be doing it, in all likelihood, if not for Sadie. Talk about being tethered: No take-off, no suspension of disbelief, no floating in the air and trying to sleep while a pilot does all the work. I’m doing the work, with Sadie’s help. She’s my road dog.

Doonesbury — Free at last.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Sunday Reading

Old Warriors — Jill Filipovic at The Nation explores the myth that Roe v. Wade started the culture war and that marriage equality will further it.

Numerous commentators, most notably at The New York Times, have expressed concern that a broad ruling on marriage equality could turn into the next Roe v. Wade, igniting decades-long culture wars and damaging public perception of the Supreme Court. Better to rule narrowly, they say, and let the states follow the emerging trajectory towards marriage equality.

That argument, though, is not only totally ahistorical, but dangerous for both civil rights and the Court’s credibility.

Contrary to the current mythology, Roe didn’t incite the culture wars, and before the case was decided in 1973, the right to abortion across the fifty states was far from a foregone conclusion. As Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel detail in their book Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, an organized, primarily Catholic Church–backed anti-abortion movement existed in force before Roe. Although abortion rights were initially championed by Republicans and favored by a majority of Americans, social conservatives saw an opening to exploit for political gain. According to Greenhouse, before the Court decided Roe, conservative architects of the “New Right” had already decided to use opposition to abortion as part of a strategy for party realignment that would come to fruition with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. “New Right” leaders sought to bring Catholics and into the party and politicize Evangelicals to form a coalition of traditionalists based on hostility to progress and change.

Abortion was hardly their only issue. The new conservative coalition opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, claiming that gender equality would destroy the family and send our daughters to war. They stoked white voters’ fears of full racial integration with racist tropes about black criminals and welfare queens. Those narratives and appeals to tradition continue today, with social conservatives hoping for a return to a gauzy vision of Good Old Days America before the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s—and before women, people of color, religious minorities and other marginalized groups were able to secure a full range of rights.

A different ruling in Roe—or none at all—wouldn’t have prevented a Republican Party realignment that was already underway. It wouldn’t have prevented abortion, and the rights of women and other traditionally disempowered groups, from becoming controversial political issues. But a Roe-free United States would almost certainly mean a United States wherein abortion laws were wildly varied, with women in many parts of the country having no legal right to abortion at all. Similarly, even though Brown v. Board of Education inspired an immediate backlash from Southern racists, it’s tough to argue that without court intervention, racial integration of public schools and other facilities would be better without Brown than the (admittedly lacking) state of racial equality today.

Acceptance — Aaron Hartzler tells how he gets along with his parents who would rather see him dead than gay.

“Honey, we’re praying for you.”

This is how my mother ends every email she sends me. Typed in italics and peppered with smiling emoticons, Mom’s electronic missives are as precious as she is — as earnest as the Empty Tomb Cake she bakes each spring on Good Friday. An edible replica of the cave where Jesus was buried after dying on the cross for our sins, the Empty Tomb Cake is the standard passion week centerpiece in my childhood home. It is frosted in gray, surrounded by a field of green coconut grass, and finished off with a Hostess Ding-Dong as the stone that was rolled away. On Saturday night, after everyone goes to bed, Mom steals into the kitchen under cover of night and rolls the Hostess Ding-Dong away from the door of the Empty Tomb Cake, then retouches the frosting. On Easter morning Jesus has risen — right there in the middle of the kitchen table.

As sweet as Mom’s loving messages and born-again baked goods appear at face value, there’s a silent threat in “we’re praying for you” that sticks in my craw. I came out to my parents the first time at the age of 19 when I was kicked out of the Bible college where my dad taught. Since then, their ongoing prayers for my “deliverance” from “Satan’s lie of homosexuality” have continued unabated in the presence of my four younger siblings and the unsuspecting wait staffs of Olive Garden restaurants nationwide. Indeed, my parents offer a never-ending stream of supplication to a God they’re certain is testing them with a son who has been blinded to the righteous pursuit of a female partner by the penis-shaped temptation of Satan.

“We’re praying for you” isn’t a harmless afterthought. It’s not a pleasant wish for my general well-being, continued physical health or financial security. No, my mother’s “we’re praying for you” is an italicized baseball bat, a silent plea for God to change her oldest son from something abhorrent and abominable back to the fresh-faced young man who dated the captain of the Bible college cheerleading squad, before it was discovered he was also sleeping with the captain of the boy’s soccer team.

Very Natural Gas — A dairy farm in Indiana goes for recycling in a big way.

Here at one of the largest dairy farms in the country, electricity generated using an endless supply of manure runs the equipment to milk around 30,000 cows three times a day.

For years, the farm has used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a cafe, a gift shop and a maze of child-friendly exhibits about the world of dairy, including a 4D movie theater.

All that, and Fair Oaks Farms was still using only about half of the five million pounds of cow manure it vacuumed up from its barn floors on a daily basis. It burned off the excess methane, wasted energy sacrificed to the sky.

But not anymore.

The farm is now turning the extra manure into fuel for its delivery trucks, powering 42 tractor-trailers that make daily runs to raw milk processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials from the federal Department of Energy called the endeavor a “pacesetter” for the dairy industry, and said it was the largest natural gas fleet using agricultural waste to drive this nation’s roads.

“As long as we keep milking cows, we never run out of gas,” said Gary Corbett, chief executive of Fair Oaks, which held a ribbon-cutting event for the project this month and opened two fueling stations to the public.

“We are one user, and we’re taking two million gallons of diesel off the highway each year,” he said. “That’s a big deal.”

Doonesbury — Live birth.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Sunday Reading

Two Judges — Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic profiles the two GOP-appointed judges whose rulings brought DOMA and Prop 8 to the doors of the Supreme Court.

I don’t know about you, but for me, the run-up to next week’s Supreme Court same-sex marriage arguments now has the feel of an endless Super Bowl pregame show. The analysis, the speculation, the sidebars, the color, the posturing, the winks and nods to insiders, the profiles — it just goes on and on, when all anyone really wants is for the arguments to occur, and to be done with, and for the justices to render their decisions the last week of June. That, and for Beyonce to sing the anthem when the justices enter the chamber Tuesday at 10 a.m.

Supporters of same-sex marriage have virtually all the legal, political and cultural momentum going into the arguments over California’s Proposition 8 (Tuesday) and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (Wednesday). Justice Anthony Kennedy, who will almost certainly determine the outcome of both cases, therefore has plenty of cover to do what many suspect he wants to do, which is to protect same-sex couples in whole or in part from the discrimination inherent in both the state initiative and the federal statute. It would be very surprising if he did not so rule.

So on the eve of the start of what promises to be a dramatic week in the history of the Court, and also in the history of the gay rights movement in America, and because I cannot think of anything else to mention that someone smarter than me hasn’t already covered, I just want to remind everyone waiting for the sanctification to begin that it was two Republican-appointed federal trial judges, at opposite ends of the country, who got all of this rolling three years ago with rulings that vitiated both the legal and factual rationales behind these dubious measures.

Judge Joseph Tauro

On the East Coast, it was U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, the Nixon appointee, the revered son of a revered Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, who declared in July 2010 that “no fairly conceivable set of facts” could justify the classification of marriage contained in Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. If this section of the statute really is doomed, it was this ruling, from a judge who now has served 41 years on the bench, that marked the beginning of the end of the heart of the law.

[...]

Judge Vaughn Walker

On the West Coast, it was the now-retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, who first struck down Proposition 8 — and also exposed the paucity of the arguments once made on its behalf. At one point during the Proposition 8 trial, without a trace of irony, Judge Walker asked Charles Cooper, the lead attorney opposed to same-sex marriage: “Seven million Californians, 70 judges, and this long history that you described. Why did you present but one witness on the subject?” Cooper had no good answer. He still doesn’t.

[...]

Although both men have played an enormous role in shaping the legal and political history of these two cases, and thus the history of same-sex marriage itself, it is unlikely that the work of either will be identified (much less discussed) during oral arguments next week. Unfortunately, there is only one former trial judge on the current Court — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who presided in New York. The rest of the justices rarely express interest in the trial record, especially where, as here, the core questions are ones of constitutional law.

But before we all move on to whatever comes next for same-sex marriage in America, we ought to pause to remember what has come before. Two Republican judges, two senior-status members of the federal judiciary, directly confronted one of the most divisive social issues of our time. They issued clear and direct rulings that swept away one myth after another about same-sex marriage and the legislative and societal rationales against it. And, in doing so, they gave constitutional cover to the executive branch to alter its course.

The Supreme Court may disagree with the assessments of Judge Tauro and Judge Walker — at least three justices in Washington almost certainly will — but that won’t change what we already have seen with our own eyes. Judge Tauro explained why the DOMA is indefensible. Judge Walker explained why Proposition 8 is unjust and unequal. Each in his own way did, in other words, precisely what we hope and expect our life-tenured federal judges to do when the whims and caprices of the majority are turned loose upon a distinct and vulnerable minority.

Final Judgment — George Packer of The New Yorker on Iraq.

The week of the invasion, I was in Ivory Coast, on assignment for this magazine to report on a civil war. In fact, I was travelling through rebel-held territory near the Liberian border with Mike Kamber, whom I had just met, and with whom I spent many hours driving over dirt roads through hair-raising checkpoints guarded by drunk or stoned or just zoned-out teen-agers with Kalashnikovs. But we kept discussing the other war, the one that the rest of the world was waiting for. I think we both were anxious to finish up our reporting in West Africa and head to the Middle East. An overwhelming tide of history was about to wash over Iraq.

The decade between that fateful week and the present moment has telescoped, compressed down to a single, terrible judgment: the war was a disaster for Iraq and the U.S. alike. It was conceived in deceit and born in hubris, a historic folly that took the American eye off Al Qaeda and the Taliban, while shattering Iraq into a million bloody pieces. When the last American troops departed a little over a year ago, there was no sense on this side of triumph or satisfaction–nothing but sadness and relief. Iraq, meanwhile, remains a dramatically violent country. Its politics are oriented toward Iran and the broader Shiite side of a looming regional war. After two trillion dollars, thousands of American lives, and over a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, there is so little U.S. influence that we can’t get the government of Iraq to interdict Iranian weapons shipped across its territory to arm the soldiers of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iraq has rejected the organ transplant and gone its own way. I imagine that there are far fewer American traces left in Baghdad than there were in Saigon after 1975.

No Safe Spaces — Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon on how women aren’t safe in social media.

The wheels of justice turn slowly – unless you’re talking about the court of social media. There, the past few days have been an object lesson in instant payback – mostly aimed at females who’ve had the audacity to speak up.

The week started with the arrests of two Steubenville girls after the guilty verdicts in the rape case against two local teenage football players. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer explained, “The 16-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of aggravated menacing for threatening the life of the victim on Twitter. The 15-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of menacing for threatening bodily harm to the victim on Facebook.” The threats against the victim were merely the latest ugly attacks in a case that was, from its beginning, about the devastating power of online community’s hostility toward girls and women.

Then, in a remarkably familiar-feeling case in Connecticut, a 13-year-old girl who’d accused two local football players of sexual assault found herself the target of online harassment. Writing in the Register Citizen, Jessica Glenza chronicled the outpouring of anger toward the young “whore” whose “snitching” was “ruining the lives” of the boys involved. As one observer mused on Twitter, “I wanna know why there’s no punishment for young hoes.”

And then, for the grand finale capping off the week, there was the crapstorm unleashed after Adria Richards tweeted a photograph of the men she claimed were making explicit and offensive comments during a recent conference. The tweet set off an explosive chain of overreaction, one that led to the firing of a PlayHaven developer and then, inevitably, an outpouring of wrath aimed at Richards.

[...]

At its best, social media illuminates aggression and injustice – Steubenville surely would have played out very differently were it not for the loathsome virtual trail the participants left in their wake. But the mob mentality of “punish the bitch,” a pattern that shows up again and again and again with sickening predictability, is real and it’s got to change. This week, the bullies, feeling offended about rape and sexism, went on the attack. And the bullies won.

Doonesbury — What sells.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Sunday Reading

Far Less Hokey and Weird — Recovering conservative wunderkind Jonathon Krohn returns to CPAC.

Does being back at CPAC, the annual gathering of conservatives from all over the country, feel weird?

That’s the question I got everywhere I turned these past few days. I suppose it was a natural question to ask, seeing as I had been a high profile speaker at the conference in 2009 as a thirteen year-old conservative wunderkind, before renouncing conservatism last year. So my return this year was an object of fascination to many.

The answer to the question is: No, it didn’t feel weird. I mean, I guess it should have, but it didn’t. In a way going back to CPAC seemed like going back home and visiting your old libertarian friend from high school: it’s pretty predictable, there’s a familiarity to the situation, you know the kind of stuff she’s going to say, you never know exactly how (or why) she says the stuff she says (and neither does she, in all likelihood), and so long as you don’t talk politics and just listen, you’ll be fine.

Still, there definitely were differences between this year’s CPAC and the conferences of the past, which may signify larger differences in the conservative movement more broadly.

Last time I attended CPAC, I remember seeing the Ron Paulers in full force. As soon as Congressman Paul (R-TX) arrived, it was like something out of A Hard Days Night: security had to escort Paul to the green room and then back out of the building afterwards. The room was packed whenever he came on stage, but, to be honest, his Young Americans for Liberty group seemed kind of too far-out for a lot of people — even though they came in force the second time I went, even bringing along a pair of those inflatable Sumo-wrestling suits for their booth (don’t ask…I know I didn’t).

This time around, Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), his “Stand With Rand” campaigners and today’s YA for Liberty all seemed far less hokey and weird, and much more a part of the mainstream.

The sleeker, more polished member of the Paul political franchise, Rand showed himself to be a more than capable campaigner. With his new (and free!) Stand With Rand t-shirts, buttons, wristbands, and campaign signs (which all look strangely like the cover art one might see on a White Stripes album) Rand Paul brought down the house at CPAC with arguably the best speech of the convention to one of the biggest (if not the biggest) crowd of the weekend. His insistence upon using the “stand” line over and over again (“stand for righteousness,” “stand with me”) gave it the sound of a campaign announcement or stump speech, while the abundance of overly-enthusiastic Paul staffers gave it the feel of a convention speech.

But most interestingly—to me anyway—was the fact that while the base of the Paul family’s support is almost entirely composed of young people, most of the Young Republicans I spoke to who voted for Rand in the straw poll actually told me they had never been (and still aren’t) fans of Ron Paul. When I asked them their reasoning, the almost universal reply by a country mile was: Rand is more polished and electable.

Phone Hangups — Ian Bogost laments that you can’t slam down the receiver on a Smartphone.

When I was a kid, we had a bright yellow, rotary Western Electric model 554, the wall-mountable companion to the 500 desk set. Before answering machines, caller id, *69, and eventually smartphone address books allowed us to screen calls quickly, a ringing phone was a pressing matter. It could mean anything: a friend’s invitation, a neighbor’s request, a family emergency. You had to answer to find out. Telephones rang loud, too, with urgency and desperation. One simply did not ignore the telephone.

In the context of such gravity, the hangup had a clear and forceful meaning. It offered a way of ending a conversation prematurely, sternly, aggressively. Without saying anything, the hangup said something: we’re done, go away.

My father took great pride in hanging up our model 554 phone violently when something went awry. An inbound wrong number dialed twice in a row, or an unwelcome solicitor. Clang! The handset’s solid mass crashed down on the hook, the bell assembly whimpering from the impact. The mechanical nature of telephones made hangups a material affair as much as a social one. A hangup is something your interlocutor could feel physically as much as emotionally, and something you couldn’t downplay either. Like slamming a door or yelling at a child, hanging up a phone couldn’t be subdued or hidden.

Unlike today’s cellular network, the public switched telephone network was robust and centralized thanks to monopoly. Apart from flukes like my son depressing the hook switch, a disconnected landline call is almost unheard of. By contrast, it’s not possible to hang up on someone via smartphone with deliberateness, because it’s so much more likely that the network itself will disconnect of its own accord. Every call is tenuous, constantly at risk of failing as a result of system instability: spectrum auctions, tower optimizations, network traffic, and so forth. The infrastructure is too fragile to make hangups stand out as affairs of agency rather than of accident.

Today a true hangup — one you really meant to perform out of anger or frustration or exhaustion — is only temporary and one-sided even when it is successfully executed. Even during a heated exchange, your interlocutor will first assume something went wrong in the network, and you could easily pretend such a thing was true later if you wanted. Calls aren’t ever really under our control anymore, they “drop” intransitively. The signal can be lost, the device’s battery can deplete, the caller can accidentally bump the touch screen and end the call, the phone’s operating system can crash. The mobile hangup never signals itself as such, but remains shrouded in uncertainties.

Bird Foodies — Ethan Kuperberg eavesdrops.

Two jay birds, a crow, and a raven sit on the branch of a large tree. Dusk.

EURASIAN JAY: I was thinking we could all go for thistle seeds tonight.

BLUE JAY: Oh, thistle seeds. Cool.

EURASIAN JAY: Something wrong with thistle seeds?

BLUE JAY: No, that sounds great. It’s just that I had thistle seeds for lunch, so…

EURASIAN JAY: Do you want something else then?

BLUE JAY (sighs): What I want is for you to know what I want.

EURASIAN JAY: Jennifer, please. We have guests.

Silence. Various feather rufflings.

RAVEN: Courtney and I would be down for some carrion.

CROW: Carrion is exactly what I feel like right now. How’d you know, babe?

RAVEN: I just know you, babe.

EURASIAN JAY (coughs): Do you want carrion, Jen?

BLUE JAY: You know I’m vegan, right? Vegans don’t eat carrion.

EURASIAN JAY: Oh, that’s right. You’re vegan. Weird, because I thought vegans aren’t supposed to eat insects.

BLUE JAY: That was like two months ago. I’ve recommitted since then. You try being vegan, it’s harder than it looks.

EURASIAN JAY: Somebody get her a medal.

RAVEN (stretching): Carrion’s pretty good, Jen.

BLUE JAY: I don’t eat carrion. I don’t want carrion. Carrion is off the menu.

Silence. Someone chirps.

BLUE JAY: Why don’t we go to that bird feeder on Elm?

EURASIAN JAY: That place will be packed at this hour.

BLUE JAY: Then we’ll wait. It wouldn’t hurt us to wait. And talk.

All grumble.

EURASIAN JAY: I don’t see what the problem is with thistle seeds.

RAVEN: Here’s the problem: some of us like flavor.

BLUE JAY: Thank you, Steve.

RAVEN: What about some snails? Have you guys ever had invertebrates?

CROW: College boy over here.

RAVEN: I’m trying to be helpful.

BLUE JAY: Hey, we all like nuts. It’s been ages since I’ve had a good nut. I know a great tree.

EURASIAN JAY: Why don’t you guys get nuts and I’ll get thistle seeds?

BLUE JAY: That ruins the whole point of eating together, David.

Silence.

Doonesbury — Twits galore.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Sunday Reading

The Good, Racist People — Ta-Nehisi Coates on the fact that even today an Oscar-~~nominated~~ winning actor — Forrest Whitaker — can be suspected of being a shoplifter because of the color of his skin.

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”

A half-century later little had changed. The comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, “I’m not a racist,” and called the claim “insane.”

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.

And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.

The “Undocuqueers” – Benjy Sarlin at TPM on the hurdles that remain for gay couples with immigration issues.

A report released Friday by the Williams Institute at UCLA calculated that out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be America today, 267,000 adults identify as LGBT. Another 637,000 LGBT adults were legal immigrants. Gary Gates, a scholar at the Williams Institute, said that the number was a conservative estimate based on cross-referencing survey data on undocumented immigrants, sexual orientation, along with data on married same sex couples. Gates’ remarks came at an event in Washington, D.C., debuting the finding that was hosted by the liberal Center for American Progress.

There are some issues gay and immigrant rights groups are looking to address that concern specifically LGBT immigrants, for example greater sensitivity towards gay and transgendered detainees taken into custody by ICE. But the dominant issue affects U.S. citizens and immigrants alike: the ability to sponsor one’s partner or spouse for a visa.

The Defense of Marriage Act, now under review by the Supreme Court, bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex couples. That means that the usual laws allowing citizens to bring foreign-born husbands or wives to America under a family visa don’t apply. The result is often that couples are forced into effective exile: the popular progressive blogger Glenn Greenwald, for example, lives in Brazil with his partner because only Brazilian law recognizes their relationship and grants Greenwald permanent residency.

According to the Williams Institute, the nation is home to an estimated 32,300 same-sex binational couples in which one spouse is an American and the other a non-citizen. According to Gates, more than half have children, meaning entire families face the prospect of being split apart if a foreign partner or spouse can’t find an alternative visa through work, school, or other family relationships — a process that can take years in the best of circumstances.

Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist and activist who revealed in 2011 that he himself was an undocumented immigrant, said at CAP’s event on Friday that his grandfather was upset when he came out as gay in part because it closed off one possible avenue to citizenship.

“I ruined the plan,” he said. “The plan was to come to America, marry a woman, and get my papers that way.”

Sleepytime — Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker: The science of sleep is an eye-opener.

Of the many ways that things can go wrong in bed, sleep troubles are probably the most prevalent. According to a 2011 poll, more than half of Americans between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four experience a sleep problem almost every night, and nearly two-thirds complain that they are not getting enough rest during the week. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that fifty to seventy million Americans suffer from a “chronic disorder of sleep and wakefulness.” The results are dangerous as well as annoying. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that almost five per cent of adults acknowledge nodding off at the wheel at least once during the previous month. The U.S. Department of Transportation has determined that what might be called D.W.D.—driving while drowsy—causes forty thousand injuries a year in the United States and more than fifteen hundred deaths.

Our collective weariness is the subject of several new books, some by professionals who study sleep, others by amateurs who are short of it. David K. Randall’s “Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep” belongs to the latter category. It’s a good book to pick up during a bout of insomnia.

Randall begins with an account of his own sleep problems, which include laughing, humming, grunting, bouncing, kicking, and, on at least one occasion, sleep-walking into a wall. He considers a range of possible explanations for the national exhaustion—too much light, too much warmth, too much avoirdupois—and finds them all compelling. The electric light bulb has made darkness optional, eliminating the enforced idleness that used to begin at sunset. Modern mattresses and bedclothes trap the heat that the body gives off as its core temperature drops each night. Obesity increases the chances of developing sleep apnea, a condition that combines choking and waking in an exhausting, sometimes life-threatening cycle. For all these reasons and more, Randall anticipates a bright future for the emerging field of “fatigue management.” One sleep expert he interviews predicts that “fatigue management officers” will soon be as common at major corporations as accountants. Like time, sleep, it turns out, is money.

Doonesbury — Soul-searching.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Sunday Reading

Obama’s LBJ Moment — David Rohde on how Barack Obama’s war on inequality matches the efforts of the war on poverty.

He quoted Jack Kennedy but sounded more like Lyndon Johnson.

In an audacious State of the Union address Tuesday, President Barack Obama made sweeping proposals to reduce poverty, revive the middle class and increase taxes on the “well off.” While careful to not declare it outright, an emboldened second-term president laid out an agenda that could be called a “war on inequality.”

“There are communities in this country where no matter how hard you work, it is virtually impossible to get ahead,” Obama declared in a blunt attack one a core conservative credo. “And that’s why we need to build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class for all who are willing to climb them.”

In his 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson introduced the legislation that became known as the “War on Poverty.” Those laws – along with many others he shepherded – stand today as perhaps the greatest legislative achievement of any modern president. Whether or not one agrees with him, Johnson’s laws – from the Civil Rights Act, to Medicaid, Medicare and Head Start, to sweeping federal urban renewal and education programs – changed the face of American society.

Obama, of course, is very different from LBJ and governing in a vastly different time. While Johnson excelled at cajoling legislators, Obama reportedly finds it distasteful. Where Johnson could offer new federal programs, Obama must maneuver in an age where the federal government is distrusted. And while Johnson had full government coffers, Obama lives in an era of crushing fiscal constraint.

Those differences, though, make Obama’s second inaugural address and Tuesday’s State of the Union all the more remarkable. As Richard W. Stevenson noted in the New York Times, “he continued trying to define a 21st-century version of liberalism that could outlast his time in office and do for Democrats what Reagan did for Republicans.”

Torture vs. Drones — Jane Mayer at The New Yorker.

There are some disturbing similarities between the Obama white paper and the Bush torture memos. Both use slippery legal language to parse dark government programs. Both have been deliberately hidden from public and even congressional oversight. And both involve the blurring of C.I.A. and military operations, and even include some of the same personnel. John Brennan, Obama’s nominee to direct the C.I.A., is a long-time veteran of the agency who, prior to joining the Obama Administration, served as chief of staff for former C.I.A. director George Tenet, under the Bush Administration during the depths of the torture scandal. Despite this, several human-rights experts have endorsed Brennan’s promotion, and Obama seems to respect him deeply. Whether that trust is well-placed remains to be seen; Brennan’s refusal, during his Senate confirmation hearings last week, to admit that waterboarding—the partial drowning of a prisoner—is a form of torture was a chilling display of institutional loyalty.

Clearly there are plenty of troubling questions surrounding the Obama Administration’s targeted-killing program. But, that said, are Obama’s drones comparable in terms of human-rights violations, to Bush’s Torture program?

Those who argue so miss an important distinction, one that David Cole also has brought up: torture under all our systems of law—including the laws of war—is illegal. This is true without exception, regardless of the circumstances, including national-security emergencies. Torture is also condemned by every major religion. Waterboarding was, and is, a form of torture. This has been established as far back as the Spanish Inquisition, and as recently as the Vietnam War. To argue otherwise is to legalize criminality. That was what the Bush Administration’s torture memos did.

Bark Bark Woof Woof — According to Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, maybe dogs really can talk.

During the day, our dog Mystique is sweet and demure, but at night she becomes a different animal. She guards our house, barking ferociously every time someone comes within earshot. The only problem is that our house is on the main trail where the night staff walk back and forth after dark. Mystique dutifully barks at all passersby whether she has known them for a day or all her life. But if there was really a cause for concern, like a strange man with a gun, I wonder if Mystique would bark in a way that would alert me that there was something dangerous and different about the person approaching the house.

Dog vocalizations may not sound very sophisticated. Raymond Coppinger pointed out that most dog vocalizations consist of barking, and that barking seems to occur indiscriminately. Coppinger reported on a dog whose duty was to guard free-ranging livestock. The dog barked continuously for seven hours, even though no other dogs were within miles. If barking is communicative, dogs would not bark when no one could hear them. It seemed to Coppinger that the dog was simply relieving some inner state of arousal. The arousal model is that dogs do not have much control over their barking. They are not taking into account their audience, and their barks carry little information other than their emotional state.

Perhaps barking is another by-product of domestication. Unlike dogs, wolves rarely bark. Barks make up as little as 3 percent of wolf vocalizations. Meanwhile, the experimental foxes in Russia bark when they see people, while the control foxes do not. Frequent barking when aroused is probably another consequence of selecting against aggression.

However, more recent research indicates that there might be more to barking than we first thought. Dogs have fairly plastic vocal cords, or a “modifiable vocal tract.” Dogs might be able to subtly alter their voices to produce a wide variety of different sounds that could have different meanings. Dogs might even be altering their voices in ways that are clear to other dogs but not to humans. When scientists have taken spectrograms, or pictures, of dog barks, it turns out that not all barks are the same — even from the same dog. Depending on the context, a dog’s barks can vary in timing, pitch and amplitude. Perhaps they have different meanings.

Doonesbury — Anybody can do it.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Sunday Reading

A Different Language — Former Congressman Tom Allen on the modern GOP.

Nothing I had learned about politics before my election prepared me for the intense polarization of contemporary congressional politics. When I first went to Washington to work for Sen. Ed Muskie in 1970, Republicans and Democrats debated public issues vigorously, but there was more genuine give-and-take and mutual respect, and the players did not treat politics as a blood sport. Six years on the Portland City Council taught me that most local issues could be resolved without petty or partisan combat.

Dwight Eisenhower accepted the major legislation of the New Deal. John Kennedy started the legislative push for a substantial tax cut. Lyndon Johnson came from a Senate known for working across the aisle. Richard Nixon signed clean water and clean air legislation. Ronald Reagan raised taxes many times to deal with mounting deficits created by his 1981 tax cut; George H. W. Bush did the same, to resounding criticism from the Right. Bill Clinton antagonized elements of his Democratic base by supporting a balanced federal budget, free trade and welfare reform.

George W. Bush was different. His election in 2000 was, in hindsight, stage two of the Newt Gingrich revolution. Senator Lincoln Chafee (R.-R.I.) recalled, shortly after Bush’s election, that Dick Cheney quickly laid out to a small group of moderate Senate Republicans, “a shockingly divisive political agenda for the new Bush administration, glossing over nearly every pledge the Republican ticket had made to the American voter.” In his first term, President Bush abandoned international treaties, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and drove through two massive tax cuts that primarily benefitted wealthy Americans.

Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign employed “microtargeting” as a part of their successful strategy of mobilizing the Republican base instead of reaching out to the middle. That political strategy was consistent with the Bush administration’s style of governing and the way Gingrich and Tom DeLay controlled Congress: Drive through the most right-wing policy that the Republican caucus could support; only move legislation that has the support of a substantial majority of the majority party; take no prisoners.

As I listened over the years to baffling arguments in committee, on the House floor or in private conversations, I lost hope in our capacity for bipartisan agreement on our major public policy challenges. On budgets, taxes, health care and climate change, the evidence that mattered to us made no difference to our Republican colleagues. What Democrats took as well-established fact, Republicans understood as easily dismissed opinions. When we wondered, “Do these guys believe what they say?” our answer was usually no. But if the Republicans didn’t believe the things they were saying, they were extraordinarily gifted performers on the House floor.

Major Dilemma — Matthew O’Brien on liberal arts majors and the economy.

Is our college students learning?

Rarely is the question not asked nowadays. Graduates now face a tough labor market and even tougher debt burdens, which has left many struggling to find work that pays enough to pay back what they owe. Today, as my colleague Jordan Weissmann points out, young alums aren’t stuck in dead-end jobs much more than usual (despite the scare stories you may have heard). But that’s a cold comfort for grads who borrowed a lot to cover the high cost of their degrees.

There are two, well, schools of thought about why freshly-minted grads have had such a tough time recently. You can blame the smarty-pants majors or blame the economy. In other words, students can’t get good jobs either because they aren’t learning (at least not the right things) in college, or because there aren’t enough good jobs, period.

This is far from an academic debate. If recent grads can’t find good work because they didn’t learn any marketable skills, there’s little the government can do to help, besides “nudging” current students to be more practical. And that’s exactly what conservative governors in Florida and North Carolina are considering with proposals to charge humanities majors higher tuition than, say, science majors at state schools.

But there’s an obvious question. If liberal arts majors “didn’t learn much in school,” as Jane Shaw put it in the Wall Street Journal, why haven’t they always had trouble finding work? Are there just more of them now, or is this lack of learning just a recent phenomenon?

Breaking News — Jim Romenseko with a story about The Onion that should be from The Onion.

When WSFA-TV (Montgomery, Ala.) reporter Jennifer Oravet read in The Onion that PR firm Hill & Knowlton was advising the U.S. to cut ties with Alabama, she went to work, made a phone call and posted her findings on Facebook:

“I contacted the PR firm listed in this article, they claim the article is ‘ficticious’ and have no involvement in the alleged study.”

Actually, Jennifer, all Onion articles are fictitious. (Just one c.)

Did she know that when she put in the call to Hill & Knowlton? I called WSFA to find out and was told that Oravet is taking the day off. A newsroom colleague – she wouldn’t give me her name – insisted that the reporter/anchor knew the Hill & Knowlton/Alabama story was fake from the start.

“It doesn’t sound like it based on her Facebook post,” I said.

“Did you see her report?” the colleague asked.

I said I had, and figured she had been set straight about The Onion before going on air. Wrong, I was told — Oravet always knew it was a satirical paper.

WSFA Facebook commenters have their doubts, too. One writes:

“I don’t know what’s better, her original post, or her backpedaling to ‘cover up; her mistake. I’ve done dummy things like that (most recent when I applauded Beyonce at the inauguration… lip sync anyone?) but come on, admit you’re stupid sometimes just like the rest of us.”

Another person writes:

“LOL, so I read through the comments and I see that someone “demands” we give [her] a break. Seriously?? Someone takes the Onion as serious and we should give a break??? Eff that, this was a fail of epic proportions and should be exploited to the nth degree. There’s honestly no coming back from this! Only in Bama!”

I’ve emailed Oravet for comment, hoping she occasionally checks in on days off. I also called and emailed WSFA news director Scott Duff earlier this afternoon.

Doonesbury — Baby, baby.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Sunday Reading

Worst Pro-Gun Argument Ever — Mark Nuckols writes that the idea of the “citizen militia” sounds all Yankee-Doodley, but history proves that armed civilians tend to go after each other instead of the tyrant.

The constitutional government of the United States has never been perfect, but it has repeatedly corrected its mistakes and sometime tendencies to abridge the fundamental rights of its citizens. If this basic order and balance is ever imperiled, it will almost certainly be under circumstances of severe economic stress. And in such circumstances, tolerance and good faith trust in other Americans will likely be in short supply. Even today, numerous public figures routinely characterize their political opponents as enemies of American values. And a quick glance at the comments sections of websites around the Internet reveals that many people in this country already doubt the “Americanness” of their fellow citizens and the legitimacy of existing government institutions.

So a citizen uprising at any point in the foreseeable future would probably not involve like-minded constitutionalists taking up arms to defend democracy and liberty. It would more likely be a matter of one aggrieved social group attacking another. And for the most criminal and vicious members of society, the rationale of “protecting” their own rights would be a convenient justification for straight-up looting, robbery, and bloodshed.

There may never be a time when all the people in this country embrace one another as true Americans or accept the authority of their political leadership. Which may be part of the country’s boisterous — if sometimes overly enthusiastic and even paranoid — democratic tradition. But as we debate the role of firearms in our society, it makes no sense to be sidetracked by the impossible and dangerous idea that a heavily armed citizenry is the ultimate safeguard of liberty in America.

Hizzoner Dishonor — Not everyone remembers former New York mayor Ed Koch fondly, especially those in the gay community who suspected him of personal reasons for being silent on AIDS in the 1980′s.

The gay brief against Koch comes in two stripes. The first is that he should have been out and that had there been an openly gay political leader of national stature urging action on AIDS, the course of the epidemic might have been very different; countless lives could have been saved. I find this counterfactual an exercise in magical thinking and ultimately unfalsifiable and unhelpful. It’s not clear that an out gay man could have been elected mayor in 1977 in the first place, especially given the “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo” signs that current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is accused of orchestrating on behalf of his father in that primary, or that an out or outed gay mayor would have won re-election in 1981 or 1985. It’s also not hard to envision a scenario in which an out or outed gay mayor would have driven from office by scandal, perhaps only adding to the shame and ostracization the gay community faced then. The point is, we just don’t know, and there are simply too many variables to plot out what kind of impact an openly gay elected official like Harvey Milk, whom Koch fell short of on many levels, would have had on the epidemic.

What we do know, or can usefully conjecture, forms the basis of a more sober if no less damning indictment of Koch—which is that the particular way in which Koch was closeted shaped his halting, seemingly indifferent reaction to the epidemic. Unlike the coy posture he adopted later in life, Koch didn’t just refuse to answer questions about his sexuality during his years in office. He aggressively—if unsuccessfully—attempted to eliminate any whiff of homosexuality from his profile. If Kirby Dick’s documentary Outrage is to be believed, Koch had a long-term relationship with a man named Dick Nathan, but broke it off before his first mayoral race (this account comes from David Rothenberg, whom Koch appointed NYC’s human rights commissioner). Nathan moved to Los Angeles (where he died of AIDS in the ’90s) and was conspicuously replaced by Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, as Koch’s beard. Koch also proclaimed himself a heterosexual in a 1989 radio show when he was running against David Dinkins, and generally took pains to distance himself from New York’s gay community.

Reading Randy Shilts’s account in And the Band Played On, it’s impossible not to conclude that Koch’s personal paranoia came to determine his policy response to AIDS. According to Shilts, Koch “warmly embraced requests that cost the city nothing,” but routinely rejected any requests—for housing for people with AIDS, for a health center in Greenwich Village, for hospice space—that came with a price tag. Koch, Shilts writes, wanted to avoid the perception that gays would get “special treatment” in his administration. The result is that “for the next two years, AIDS policy in New York would be little more than a laundry list of unmet challenges, unheeded pleas, and programs not undertaken.” “All the ingredients for a successful battle against the epidemic existed in New York City” concludes Shilts, “except for one: leadership.”

Reaching for the Stars — How the dung beetle provides insight — and a warning — about celestial navigation and light pollution.

The cosmos is nothing if not egalitarian; we are all equally small. It seems fair that Earth’s sanitation workers should benefit from the Milky Way, as the rest of us do. And dung beetles likely aren’t alone; crickets, moths, nocturnal bees, and other insects probably share their ability to navigate by the Milky Way and by polarized moonlight. “I’d be surprised if they were the only insect,” Warrant said.

One wonders, then, what will happen as the night sky disappears. Thanks to sky glow, ten per cent of the world, and forty per cent of Americans, no longer view a night sky that is fully dark. This troubles ecologists as well as astronomers. A paper published in 2011 by Christpher Kyba, a physicist at Free University, in Berlin, found that light pollution washes out the polarization of moonlight, which could have a detrimental effect on dung beetles and other insects, at least around urban areas.

“Dung beetles play an incredibly important role in revitalizing our soil,” Warrant said. “It’s a gardener’s dream, to have all this manure pushed into the dirt.” He couldn’t predict what the long-term biological consequences of sky glow might be, “apart from the fact that it probably will have some impact.” But he noted that in Australia, in the first half of the century, millions of hectares of land were ruined by the dung of imported cows. (Native dung beetles prefer the dry fare dropped by marsupials and wouldn’t touch the sloppy, foreign stuff.) Soil quality improved only after the country imported dung beetles en masse from South Africa. “You could see what kind of impact they must have in South Africa,” Warrant said, “and what it would be like if they weren’t there.”

We suppose that we are superior to dung beetles, but are we really? At least dung beetles recycle. We scavenge, hoard, consume…what? Crap, mostly. It piles up around us; increasingly we live on a ball of it. Even light we waste; designed to illuminate, it now obscures. As our celestial guides recede, we risk losing our bearings and will have ever less to consider but ourselves.

Doonesbury — Explain that.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Sunday Reading

The Culture of Rage — Stephen King, the best-selling author, knows something about guns. And he defends popular culture against the attacks from gun-rights advocates in a new essay called Guns.

As King puts it, “To claim that America’s ‘culture of violence’ is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.” Americans consume relatively high levels of gun violence, but we’re not acting out in response to it. Nor are we completely saturating ourselves in it. For instance, King observes that only two of the 10 most popular works of fiction in 2012 featured violence. Just one of the top-grossing movies of 2012 (Skyfall) showed gun killings. Sports, dance, and Mario Brothers are the nation’s most popular video games, and football and detective shows consistently score the highest television ratings.

In the coming days and weeks, gun manufacturers and lobbyists will spend millions convincing American gun owners who actually support sensible regulations that they are “under siege” from President Obama’s government. They’ll argue that the administration’s proposed universal background checks for all gun purchasers and waiting periods are tantamount to big brother keeping tabs on Americans who own firearms, and say that limiting the availability of military-style assault weapons that can fire off tens of bullets in rapid succession without reloading would leave Americans defenseless from home intruders or a government takeover.

They’ll deflect attention from guns and propose expanding access to mental health services, stationing guards in schools, and of course clamping down on the media’s glorification of violence. “One only wishes [NRA Executive Vice President and CEO] Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these [school shooting] scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander’s last meal,” King writes. Maybe then they’ll focus less on the make-believe death in media and the very real destruction that open access to military-style weapons can cause.”

Explaining the Winter Blahs — Neil Shubin explains why our internal clocks hate winter.

By late January many of us residing in northern latitudes aren’t sleeping well, overeat and are looking forward to the long sunlit days of July. Some people even get clinically depressed: a recent study revealed that some 10 percent of New Hampshire residents suffer from seasonal affective disorder. For too many people, this might seem like just a quirk of their personalities, or worse, a shortcoming. But the cause for our malaise lies in the working of our genes, organs — and, ultimately, in the chemical structure of moon rocks, like the ones returned by the Apollo space program.

Our perception of time defines the ways we interact with the planet and with one another. Humanity’s increasing need to communicate and trade has led to an ever-finer parsing of the moments of our lives with each passing year. Our need to segment a day into milliseconds — as with high-frequency stock trades — would probably have shocked our ancestors as much as a jet plane landing in the ancient African savanna.

But some clocks have not changed with technology, human interchange or commerce. Virtually every part of us — all our organs, tissues and cells — are set to a rhythm of day and night. Kidneys slow down at night. That’s a wonderful trait if you want to minimize trips outside of bed. The human liver works slowest in the morning hours, meaning the cheapest dates would be at breakfast.

How do these biological rhythms come about? We carry more than two trillion clocks inside of us. Our cellular clocks reside in the molecular machinery of DNA, which makes proteins that interact with one another and with DNA itself. Some combinations of these biological factors form a kind of molecular pendulum that swings back and forth between high and low levels of protein and gene activity, tuned to a virtual 24-hour day.

Our genetic clocks are set to the sun by our brains and our eyes. Light entering our eyes triggers a signal that ends in a tiny patch of cells in the brain. This brain region then emits hormones that coordinate the clocks in the different cells of the body. Mess with this system and things go awry really fast.

Sync or Swim — Andy Borowitz reports the latest scandal to erupt.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – A rising chorus of congressional Republicans are calling on President Obama to acknowledge that the pop singer Beyoncé lip-synched during his inaugural festivities on Monday and resign from office, effective immediately.

“By lip-synching the national anthem, Beyoncé has cast a dark cloud over the President’s second term,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “The only way President Obama can remove that cloud is by resigning from office at once.”

While many in the media have blamed Beyoncé for the lip-synching controversy, Mr. Paul said, “We must remember that this happened on President Obama’s watch.”

Mr. Paul said that the White House’s refusal to comment on the Beyoncé crisis “only serves the argument that this President has something to hide.”

“If Beyoncé lip-synched the national anthem, how do we know President Obama didn’t lip-sync his oath of office?” he said. “If that’s the case, he’s not legally President. But just to be on the safe side, he should resign anyway.”

Mr. Paul also blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her testimony on Benghazi before the Senate today: “Her tactic of answering each and every question we asked her didn’t fool anyone.”

Doonesbury — Saving grace.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Sunday Reading

Gerrymandered — How the Republicans won the House with fewer votes than the Democrats.

Media narratives of the fiscal-cliff negotiations and the upcoming debt-ceiling brinksmanship often seem premised on the idea that the American people have voted for a divided government and are demanding that President Obama and the Republican House split their differences in a responsible bipartisan bargain, grand or otherwise. But what if the voters, properly understood, haven’t actually sent such a message?

Obama won the popular vote by a comfortable margin and secured a second term in the White House. That same day, more Americans voted for Democratic Senate candidates than Republicans; this led to the inauguration, last week, of a Senate led by Democrats. And a million more Americans voted for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives than voted for Republican candidates. Yet the new House has a thirty-three-seat Republican majority.

There is one main reason for the electoral anomaly in the House: gerrymandering. Every ten years, following the decennial census mandated by the United States Constitution, state governments redraw legislative and congressional districts. Republicans have done well at capturing statehouses in recent years, even in states that have gone Democratic in Senate and Presidential votes, such as Virginia. In some of these states, Republicans have redrawn district lines with ruthless self-interest to ensure that voters elect the maximum conceivable number of Republicans to the House.

Organizational theory and common sense would suggest that both major political parties engage in such shenanigans equally, when given the opportunity. That may be so over long periods of time; there is no especially convincing reason to ascribe to the Democratic Party any self-effacing idealism about getting its people elected. And yet, in a series of compelling posts recently, the statistical election-modeller Samuel Wang, of the Princeton Election Consortium, has argued that we are in an “asymmetric” period of Republican manipulation of electoral maps.

According to Wang’s math, twenty-six seats out of the thirty-three-seat Republican advantage in the House can be attributed to gerrymandering in states with legislatures controlled by Republicans. He estimates that, in 2012, the number of American voters disenfranchised by this mapmaking—that is, the number of voters whose ballots were effectively rendered meaningless by various forms of stuffing Republican majorities into safe districts—was in the neighborhood of four million.

Permanent Solution to a Temporary Problem — Cory Doctrow mourns the death of internet genius Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide Friday night. Mr. Swartz was facing prosecution for hacking, but also had another problem: depression.

But Aaron was also a person who’d had problems with depression for many years. He’d written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.

I don’t know if it’s productive to speculate about that, but here’s a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you’ll think about, too. I don’t know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don’t know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn’t solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

Depression strikes so many of us. I’ve struggled with it, been so low I couldn’t see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan — all of these have a chance of bringing you back from those depths. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.

Safety in Numbers — Carl Hiaasen counts the folks in the NRA.

A conservative pollster reported that more than 70 percent of NRA members surveyed support certain reforms that are rabidly opposed by the leadership — requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers, for example, and banning firearm ownership by anyone on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.

Another fact that the NRA doesn’t brag about: Its funding increasingly depends on gun manufacturers, not gun owners. According to the Violence Policy Center, 22 firearms manufacturers, including Beretta USA and Smith & Wesson, gave almost $39 million to the NRA between 2005 and 2011.

So it’s basically a corporate shill promoting itself as a grass-roots defender of the Constitution.

In many states the NRA has used campaign contributions and threats of retribution to secure political puppets such as Baxley. The successful tactic has given the lobby a clout that far outweighs the true size of its constituency.

The NRA claims 4.3 million members. If you charitably assume it’s not padding the numbers, the total still represents just a tiny fraction of American gun owners, of whom there are at least 146 million.

In other words, more than 97 percent of legal gun owners in this country — hunters, target shooters, people who keep or carry a firearm for protection — don’t belong to the NRA.

Many gun owners have multiple weapons (I own two, a shotgun and a rifle), but the vast majority don’t keep assault rifles or military-style semi-automatics of the type used on the moviegoers in Aurora, Colo., the children in Newtown or, more recently, four firefighters and an off-duty policeman in Webster, New York.

Doonesbury — Job fair.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Sunday Reading

Gun Shots — Hendrik Herzberg on getting reasonable people to talk about guns.

It was hard, in the massacre’s immediate aftermath, to find a presentable advocate for the view that the No. 1 cause of gun violence is a shortage of guns. (The No. 2 cause, presumably, is a surplus of people, since people, not guns, kill people.) “Fox News Sunday” and its host, Chris Wallace, had to settle for Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas. Representative Gohmert, a birther and a climate-change denier, is normally dismissible as an amusing eccentric, a self-lampooning clown. Not this time. His chilling advice for Sandy Hook’s murdered principal—“I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office, locked up, so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off, before he can kill those precious kids”—has been widely quoted and widely deplored. What Gohmert said next has received less notice. Wallace pressed him further on why he thinks civilians should possess weapons like the M-4 (the Congressman’s choice) and the AR-15 (the school shooter’s choice and the top-selling rifle in the nation, notably in the past two weeks). “Well,” Gohmert replied,

for the reason George Washington said: a free people should be an armed people. It insures against the tyranny of the government. If they know that the biggest army is the American people, then you don’t have the tyranny that came from King George. That is why it was put in there. That’s why, once you start drawing the line, where do you stop?

After Sandy Hook, as after the Columbine horror, in 1999, and the dozens of mass shootings since, many Americans, gun owners among them, wondered why any sane person would require a rapid-fire killing machine with a foot-long banana clip to feel safe in his or her home or person, let alone to take target practice, shoot skeet, or hunt rabbits. But, for Hobbesian gun nuts of Gohmert’s ilk, the essence of the Second Amendment, when all is said and done, is not about any of that. Its real, irreducible purpose is to enable some self-designated fraction of the American people, in a pinch, to make war against the American government—to overthrow it by force and violence, if that is deemed necessary. If that’s the line you draw, then where, logically, do you stop? In Georgian times, when the amendment was ratified, the most fearsome weapon anyone, soldier or civilian, could carry was a single-shot musket. And today? “Shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles don’t shoot down black helicopters, people with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles shoot down black helicopters”? Gohmert is a fringe figure, but the fringe is as long as an AR-15’s barrel. His seditious fantasies of freelance insurrection are shared by a nontrivial portion of the N.R.A. membership and board, by the N.R.A.’s feral kid brother, the Gun Owners of America, and by a gaggle of locked-and-loaded politicians who, not long ago, were threatening “Second Amendment remedies” for policy offenses like the Affordable Care Act.

Second Acts — Actor Reed Birney comes back to Broadway in the revival of Picnic.

Winning a Tony was a childhood dream of Mr. Birney’s ever since he began fantasizing about Broadway from his rural hometown, Seaford, Del. But at 58, after landing his second job on Broadway, he is quick to say that he’d be getting ahead of himself to imagine winning Tonys.

“Right now I just feel like I’m the poster boy for perseverance,” Mr. Birney said during a recent interview in the shabby-chic living room of his boxy Upper West Side apartment, where the bookcases hold part of his 7,000-film collection and board games like Life and Battleship that he plays with his wife, the actress Constance Shulman, and their two teenagers.

“When I was young and cute, I thought I had to really get rich and famous,” he continued. “And I was getting older and my looks were going, and I wasn’t getting famous, or even a little bit famous, I thought — oh dear, what a sad thing. I was just wildly frustrated. I felt like I had something more to give, but no one was buying for the longest time.”

Now, it seems, no one can get enough of Mr. Birney, at least among downtown theater artists, many of whom are half his age. “Blasted” hit at the same time that a new crowd of cool kids was emerging Off Broadway, which included the ubiquitous director Sam Gold and his frequent muse, the playwright Annie Baker. The two recruited Mr. Birney and other actors to develop Ms. Baker’s play “Circle Mirror Transformation,” which became a major critical and audience hit Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2009.

Mr. Birney’s character, the heartbroken carpenter Schultz, became his stock in trade: Charles Isherwood began his review in The New York Times of a later production, David West Read’s “Dream of the Burning Boy,” by writing, “Reed Birney is quickly becoming New York’s foremost actor in a particular subspecialty, communicating the grief of average men facing extraordinary loss.”

Yard Sale — Want some slightly used rocket launching equipment?

On July 20, 2011, at 5:57 a.m. EDT, the space shuttle Atlantis made its final touchdown on the runway of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA’s storied shuttle program wasn’t the only thing that came to its official end that day; the intervening year-and-a-half has also seen the slow obsolescence of the tools that allowed the program to be what it was: the rocket launch pads and the equipment hangers and the buildings of Cape Canaveral.

Now, it seems, those items — those relics of a program past — will be slowly sold off. Or, perhaps, rented off. NASA, the Orlando Sentinel reports, has been advertising — quietly — a long inventory of the facilities and equipment at the Kennedy Space Center, “listing them as available for use, lease or, in some cases, outright purchase by the right business.”

Among the items in that inventory:

• launchpad 39A, where shuttles were launched;
• space in the Vehicle Assembly Building, the 526-foot-tall structure first used to assemble Saturn V-Apollo rockets;
• Orbiter Processing Facilities — essentially large garages where shuttles were once maintained;
• Hangar N (including its high-tech test equipment);
• the launch-control center;
• a 15,000-foot landing strip;
• a parachute-packing plant;
• an array of aerospace tracking antennas;
• and various other buildings and sections of undeveloped property.

NASA’s little enormous yard sale, if it does take place, may also be something of a fire sale — no rocket-fuel pun intended. The equipment in question requires careful (and expensive) maintenance; and federal funding for that maintenance is scheduled to expire by the end of 2013. The swampy environment of Cape Canaveral’s particular stretch of Florida coast is harsh on metal and other materials; if the transferrable equipment isn’t transferred within that timeframe — and if buildings aren’t used and maintained — they’ll start to rust and otherwise deteriorate in their inhospitable environment.

Doonesbury — One size fits none.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Sunday Reading

On Living Armed — Ta-Nehisi Coates answers the question, “If you were confronted with an ‘active shooter,’ do you think, in that moment, you might wish you had a gun?”

I think that last question gets to the heart of a difference. I actually wouldn’t wish I had a gun. I’ve shot a rifle at camp once, but that’s about it. If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot myself, thus doing the active shooter’s work for him (it’s usually “him.”) But the deeper question is, “If I were confronted with an active shooter, would I wish to have a gun and be trained in its use?” It’s funny, but I still don’t know that I would. I’m pretty clear that I am going to die one day. That moment will not be of my choosing, and it almost certainly will not be too my liking. But death happens. Life — and living — on the other hand are more under my control. And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.

This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it’s enough to have a baby. It’s a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I’d have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I’d have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents. The difference is I like “living” as a parent. I accept the responsibility and rewards of parenting. I don’t really want the responsibilities and rewards of gun-ownership. I guess I’d rather work on my swimming. And I think, given the concentration of guns in a smaller and smaller number of hands, there’s some evidence that society agrees.

Which is not to say those of us who don’t own guns don’t want to live. We do. But it’s not clear that this particular way of living will even be effective. I think about the shooter down at the Empire State Building a few months back. The police showed up to protect the public and ended in a shoot-out with a guy. Nine bystanders were wounded — all at the hands of the police. It’s just not clear to me that this sort of situation wouldn’t repeat itself, but with citizens doing the wounding. With that kind of risk, perhaps it’s better to handle “gun safety” before we get to the moment of an “active shooter.”

Quitter — Taylor Ellsworth finds that not everyone wanted him to quit smoking.

I’m 55 days off of smoking cigarettes.

Quitting is an incredibly difficult feat; urban legend tells us that it takes most people an average of seven attempts to quit successfully. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve tried. Though you’d think that triumphing over alcohol and bulimia would render nicotine an easy feat, it’s been anything but. In theory, it’s odd that I ever took up smoking in the first place. I’m incredibly vain and I’ve always been active. One of my first memories is comprised of rummaging through my mom’s glove box to find a cherry-red pack of Marlboro reds and subsequently tossing them out the window of the moving car while smiling devilishly at her. Needless to say, she was furious with me, and I was crushed that she didn’t find my antics charming. Several years of a pack-a-day habit later, I understand completely.

The first time I seriously tried to quit smoking, I’d been sober about two years. I’d recently taken up running and wanted to see if I could improve my lung capacity; saving money and not smelling like a homeless man were also big draws. Discussing my choice with my boyfriend and sponsor, who were both thrilled, helped solidify the decision. To my surprise, when I moved onto the rest of my support group, they were nonplussed. Half the people I knew seemed to believe that smoking helped us stay sober and sane, and that the emotional havoc that accompanied quitting wasn’t worth the (unlikely) possibility of actually making it to the other side as a nonsmoker. One well-meaning friend explained that smoking produces a rush of cigarette-specific endorphins that can’t be obtained by virtually any other means. Others told me I should wait until I was more emotionally stable, because putting myself in the heightened state of stress brought on by quitting might be too much to handle. I’d like to believe that these friends were all well intentioned. There were, of course, others who were more transparent in their intentions. Some laughed at my avowal or offered me cigarettes. While some of them might’ve just been engaging in some (albeit inappropriate) fun, others were undoubtedly jealous. Making a decision of the self-improvement variety, from quitting smoking to kicking soda, is like an open invitation to criticism to those who are insecure about their own behavior—and what better place to find insecurity-ridden jokesters than in the rooms of AA? My choice prompted other smokers to consider their own pack-a-day habits. This is human nature and I certainly recall assuming when my sponsor explained that she’d quit smoking several years prior at our first coffee and Big Book session, she must’ve been disgusted by me. Ironically, my struggle to quit has taught me immense empathy both for those who’ve quit and those who can’t bring themselves to give it up.

The Lives They Lived — The New York Times Magazine remembers just a few of the people who passed this way and then passed on this year.

This issue is meant to be a celebration of life, not an expression of grief. But since the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., grief has been unavoidable. Our wish for those who knew and loved the 20 children and 6 adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School is that they are held up by those around them until the day comes when they might feel something other than terrible loss. And our wish for the rest of us is that we all might help turn despair into hope.

Doonesbury — Movin’ on up.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Sunday Reading

A Father’s Journey — Frank Bruni talks about his relationship with his dad and being gay.

For a long while, my father’s way of coping was to walk quietly from the room. He doesn’t remember this. I do. I can still see it, still feel the pinch in my chest when the word “gay” came up — perhaps in reference to some event in the news, or perhaps in reference to me — and he’d wordlessly take his leave of whatever conversation my mother and my siblings and I were having. He’d drift away, not in disgust but in discomfort, not in a huff but in a whisper. I saw a lot of his back.

And I was grateful. Discomfort beat rejection. So long as he wasn’t pushing me away, I didn’t need him to pull me in. Heart-to-hearts weren’t his style, anyway. With Dad you didn’t discuss longings, anxieties, hurts. You watched football. You played cards. You went to dinner, you picking the place, him picking up the check. He always commandeered the check. It was the gesture with which he communicated everything he had trouble expressing in other ways.But at some point Dad, like America, changed. I don’t mean he grew weepy, huggy. I mean he traveled from what seemed to me a pained acquiescence to a different, happier, better place. He found peace enough with who I am to insist on introducing my partner, Tom, to his friends at the golf club. Peace enough to compliment me on articles of mine that use the same three-letter word that once chased him off. Peace enough to sit down with me over lunch last week and chart his journey, which I’d never summoned the courage to ask him about before.

It’s been an extraordinary year, probably the most extraordinary yet in this country’s expanding, deepening embrace of gays and lesbians as citizens of equal stature, equal worth. For the first time, an American president still in office stated his belief that two men or two women should be able to marry. For the first time, voters themselves — not lawmakers, not courts — made same-sex marriage legal. This happened on Election Day in three states all at once: Maine, Maryland and Washington. A corner was turned.

And over the quarter-century leading up to it, at a succession of newspapers in a succession of cities, I interviewed scores of people about the progress we were making and why. But until last week, I couldn’t bring myself to examine that subject with the person whose progress has meant the most to me: my dad.

In my case, my father and my mother have been the most giving, loving and supportive parents a son could wish for in his life’s journey. My father is the opposite of Mr. Bruni’s; loving, compassionate, free to display his emotions and give a hug, warm and giving to friends and lovers, open in his disdain for those who reject their gay children, and concerned above all with my happiness. I count the blessing every day that my parents are with me, always have been, put up with my fancies and dreams, and gave me the strength and courage to be who I am. In that simple way, they have done more for LGBT equality and freedom than all the campaigns and bumper stickers ever could. If I am ever a parent — hey, it could happen; I’m only 60 — I want to be just like them.

A Second Look — Jeffrey Toobin explains the Second Amendment for you.

Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”

But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century.

The Christmas Letter — William L. Copithorne of The Atlantic examines the tradition of people you don’t know or care about telling you everything they did this year.

“I THINK we ought to write a Christmas letter this year,” my wife said at the breakfast table the other morning.

“A what?” I asked warily.

“A Christmas letter. You know, like the kind the Huggins send out to all their friends every year.”

I recalled the Huggins’ Christmas letters: five page mimeographed reports on family activities for the preceding year, with the simple greetings of the season all but buried.

I hurried off to work before my wife could pursue the subject any further, but, that evening she presented me with a packet of letters including not only the recent efforts of the Huggins hut Christmas letters other families had sent us as well.

“Now you read these and see if you don’t think it would be a good idea for us to do this instead of sending cards this Christmas,” she said.

One would have been enough, for the letters were indistinguishable in style and content. Posing innocently as Christmas greetings, they were actually unabashed family sagas. The writers touched lightly on the misfortunes which their families suffered during the year, dwelt gladly on happy events, and missed no opportunity for self congratulation.

I haven’t the slightest intention of writing a Christmas letter myself, but once I’d put a red or green ribbon in my typewriter, I’m sure I could turn one out in no time at all.

“OUR HOUSE TO YOURS!” is the standard beginning. Centered at the top of an 8 x 11″ sheet of paper, it spares the writer the nuisance of penning salutations on the hundred or more copies he will doubtless send out. The exclamation mark is the first of dozens that will be used. No Christmas letter averages fewer than eighteen “!’s,” “!!’s,” or “(!)’s” a page.

The opening sentence always starts with the word “Well.” “Well, here it is Christmas again!” is a favorite; or, “Well, hard as it is to realize, Christmas has rolled round once more!” A somewhat more expansive opening is “Well, Christmas finds us all one year older, but young as ever in the spirit of the Season!” Actually what is said is unimportant as long as the sentence starts with “Well,” and ends, of course, with an exclamation mark.

Doonesbury — They need women!

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Sunday Reading

Did This Really Happen? — Edward Small went to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I’ve always had two stock answers for people whenever they ask me about Newtown. One is, “It’s from the half of Connecticut that wants to be New York City.” The other is, “We invented Scrabble. After that, nothing really happened.” It’s a town of about 27,000 people where things don’t stay open past 10 p.m. and a boy digging a big hole is a story worthy of the local paper’s front page. It’s also where I grew up and made my first friends and got my first job and learned about 80 percent of what I know today.

And now, none of that matters.

It’s just after midnight at the end of a long day of shaking, crying, worrying, and telling several concerned friends that I’m fine. It’s only true in the narrowest sense, of course. Yesterday, 20 children were shot and killed in my old elementary school. I’m sad, confused, infuriated, and I want to do something about it. The problem is, I can’t think of anything that would actually matter.

I think that’s where a lot of the confused anger and despair I’ve been trying to deal with over the past 24 hours stems from: sheer, overwhelming impotence. The town and school where I have innumerable positive memories have both been suddenly torn away from me in the most grotesque way possible. I say that without exaggeration: we’re talking about a gunman who opened fire in an elementary school. That can’t be a real event.

When talking to friends and family about this, the one phrase that keeps coming up is “I can’t believe.” It’s a cliché, but also true in a very literal sense. I spent all day reading the headlines and the body counts, but part of me is still waiting for the grand reveal that none of this really happened because how could any of it have really happened? How could the elementary school where I wrote my first story and got in trouble for calling Ross Perot a butthead also be the site of the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting? I can’t reconcile the memories I have of Sandy Hook School with the events of today. They simply aren’t the same place.

In other words, the feeling of helplessness isn’t just coming from the fact that I can’t do anything about the murders on Friday. If anything, I’m still far too baffled as to how and why a fellow human being could kill 27 people–20 of them schoolchildren — to feel much of anything besides inchoate shock and rage. The helplessness comes more from the fact that my hometown doesn’t belong to me anymore.

What Will It Take? — From The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe on gun control.

Do you feel that? That’s your sense of moral outrage dissipating.

It may still feel raw and vivid in the wake of Friday’s bloodbath in Connecticut. But if other recent massacres are anything to go by, our collective indignation has a half-life—and it isn’t long. The tender ages of the victims at Sandy Hook made the tragedy feel exceptional, and on television and Twitter, and at kitchen tables around the country, many of us expressed an urgent sense, over the past forty-eight hours, that something should be done. Even President Obama suggested that “meaningful action” is in order, though he didn’t elaborate on what that might entail, and notably absent from his remarks was the single monosyllable that might explain how one disturbed young man could walk into an elementary school and end twenty-six lives in a matter of minutes: “gun.”

One irony of the pernicious taboo on “politicizing” a tragedy is that in some especially thorny areas of policy—like, for instance, gun control—it is only a tragedy that can summon the political momentum for change. The original Gun Control Act passed in October 1968, following the demoralizing assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The Brady Act owes its existence to the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan.

But by 2011, when Gabrielle Giffords narrowly survived a bullet in the head, the dynamic of the debate had changed. “After the Giffords shooting, I thought something would happen with gun control,” a recently retired official from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms told me last summer. But nothing did. “Apparently, a member of Congress doesn’t count,” he said. “So now I’m wondering, what exactly does it take? Another presidential assassination?”

What does it take? If a congresswoman in a coma isn’t sufficient grounds to reëvaluate the role that firearms play in our national life, is a schoolhouse full of dead children? I desperately want to believe that it is, and yet I’m not sure that I do. By this time next week, most of the people who are, today, signing petitions and demanding gun control will have moved on to other things. If you want to understand why the gun debate can occasionally feel rigged, this is the answer: the issue is characterized by a conspicuous asymmetry of fervor. The N.R.A. has only four million members—a number that is probably dwarfed by the segment of the U.S. population that feels uneasy about the unbridled proliferation of firearms. But the pro-gun constituency is ardent and organized, while the gun control crowd is diffuse and easily distracted. In the 2012 election cycle, N.R.A. spending on lobbying outranked spending by gun control groups by a factor of ten to one.

A World of Maximum Guns — Ta-Nehisi Coates on arming to the teeth.

It is human to wish that Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary, who died heroically yesterday, enjoyed some weaponry beyond her body. But are we then asking for a world in which the educators of small children are strapped? Do we want our hospital workers, our librarians, our baby-sitters, and little league coaches all armed? What is the message that such a society sends to itself and its children? What does it say about its government’s ability to perform the most essential of services–protection? And is it enough to simply be wholly sane? What do we say to the ghost of Jordan Davis, shot down over an argument of loud music, by a man who was quite sane? And where does it end? If more mass killers don body-armor, should we then start fitting ourselves in kevlar too?

This is not my area of expertise, so I am open to your thoughts. But I would hope to not live in a country where it is easier for a kid to access a gun, than it is for an adult to access the vote.

Don’t Be Afraid, Democrats — Steve Kornacki says it’s safe for them to advocate for gun control (or gun safety or whatever you want to call it.)

The Democrats’ cowardice on guns traces back to the fateful election of 2000. Clinton, despite his aggressive pursuit of gun control measures, fared relatively well with rural gun-owning populations in his 1996 reelection campaign. But those same voters turned hard on Al Gore in ’00, shifting Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee to the Republican column. A victory in any one of those states – all of which Clinton carried twice – would have made Gore president. Democrats concluded that they’d scared off rural, lower-income white voters who had traditionally supported them – and that guns were the big reason why. A new consensus emerged: Gun control could no longer be a central component of Democratic messaging. So it was that John Kerry in 2004 and Obama in 2008 and 2012 did their best to ignore the issue. Kerry went so far as to embark on a goose hunt in rural Ohio just before Election Day.

In terms of political strategy, there’s been one obvious shortcoming to this approach: It hasn’t worked. Kerry did no better than Gore in West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas, and Obama has failed to win any of those states in two elections now. What’s more, there’s been no improvement in Democratic support among gun owners in any election since 2000. As Nate Cohn pointed out Friday, the lesson Democrats should be drawing from Obama’s two victories is that they can win nationally without the pro-gun vote. The Democratic coalition continues to evolve and grow, and the rural white voters who were key to its success generations ago have become a reliably Republican constituency.

What’s more, Democrats continue to be painted as the party of gun confiscators by the NRA and its allies. Even though there was nothing in Obama’s first term record for them to object to, the NRA bitterly fought his reelection this year, treating him as if he were Michael Douglas’ character in “The American President.” In other words, Democrats are already paying the political price that comes with being the gun control party. So if they believe in it, why not just say it – and act on it?

The answer typically provided to this question is that there are a number of Democrats in Congress from states with large gun-owning populations – think Joe Manchin and Jon Tester – and that the party’s current posture makes it possible for them to win. But a better way of understanding the success of these Democrats is that it’s come in spite of the national party’s reputation. Democrats like Manchin and Tester are already winning over voters who believe national Democrats want to take their guns away; this challenge will be exactly the same if national Democrats actually do start pursuing gun control again.

Doonesbury — Wall Street’s worst nightmare.

Photo: Eric Theyer/Reuters

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Sunday Reading

Maybe Baby — Lauren Collins comments on where babies come from.

Ross Douthat’s column lamenting the declining American birthrate struck me as creepy when I read it, but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps as a childless thirty-two-year-old woman—not only an evolutionary dead end, but also a moral zero, in Douthat’s eyes—I failed to produce a response, as I have failed to produce a baby, as result of “late-modern exhaustion—a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies across the globe.” I wanted to tell Ross Douthat that there are many reasons that American women of my generation lag in both time and space, giving birth to fewer children than both our foremothers and our peers in countries such as France and the United Kingdom. Douthat is right that our government’s lack of interest in developing an infrastructure to help working mothers is a large part of the problem, if it is a problem. But so is the moralization of motherhood, which, as writers from Élisabeth Badinter to Pamela Druckerman and Katie Roiphe have recently pointed out, is rife in American society. As Badinter explains in “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines Women,” people have more babies in France, where breast-feeding is a fifty-fifty proposition and ninety-nine per cent of young children are enrolled in free, state-run daycare, precisely because having a baby in France is not such a freighted ordeal. (By the way, Douthat’s notion that the declining birthrate is linked to “a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage” is undermined by the fertile, cohabiting French.)

That’s what I wanted to tell Ross Douthat, but I had just gone for a walk, sapping myself of energy that probably would have been better used in childbearing.

The next day, I read that the Duchess of Cambridge was expecting a child, and that she had been admitted to the hospital with hyperemesis gravidarum. She was very early in her pregnancy, and it felt invasive, hearing such intimate news. The way that commentators felt entitled to have an opinion about her womb, and the way they were rooting for her to reproduce, in the name of God and country, gave me a queasy feeling. Douthat wrote that a sagging population is the result of a society that “embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity,” but might not women also be hesitating to have children, or struggling to find a way to do so, in a culture whose conception of family life is so primitive?

Carl Hiaasen has some advice for the GOP.

Based on the grim exit polls, you’d think Republican leaders would comprehend the futility of sucking up to the beet-faced Limbaugh fringe and pushing an agenda that most Americans viewed as extreme, exclusive and intrusive.

That tone had been set in the primaries by the lamest, flakiest set of candidates in modern memory. The only one who ever stood a chance was Romney, who veered so hard to the right that he couldn’t ever find his way back.

Want a sure-fire recipe for blowing another national election?

1. Keep badmouthing the poor, and bowing to the rich. This is an especially clever strategy while the country is clawing out of a recession.

2. To drive away as many women voters as possible, keep talking about banning abortions and cutting off funds for birth control.

3. Another brilliant campaign topic: Outlawing gay marriage. Keep that one on the front burner if you’re keen on alienating millions of highly motivated voters.

4. Don’t forget to bash big government every chance you get — just pray that a major hurricane doesn’t hit, and the whole country doesn’t get reminded of the importance of FEMA, the National Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and other tax-gobbling slackers.

5. Finally, keeping pushing for laws that would allow anyone who looks vaguely Hispanic to be pulled over in their cars and frisked for citizenship documents. This is how you keep your “base electorate” fired up, your base being angry, white, old and dwindling by the day.

Marco Rubio can’t avoid Iowa with its freakishly homogenous demographics (91 percent white), but he can certainly avoid coming off like a jabbering loon. He’s already separated himself from the likes of Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann by stating that he actually believes in science.

Now we’ll see if the GOP can evolve enough to let him lead the party out of its cave.

An Unexpected Party — Jon Michaud on why he thinks The Hobbit is a better book than its sequel.

With the imminent release of the first of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of “The Hobbit,” I revisited J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel, which I had not opened since I was a teen-ager. Re-reading “The Hobbit” turned out to be something of a revelation. Formerly, I’d seen it as nothing more than an appetizer for the big feast of “The Lord of the Rings.” Now, I realized, it was a perfecly balanced meal of its own—one that left you feeling sated rather than gorged. A good case can be made that “The Hobbit” is a better and more satisfying read than its gargantuan successor. Herewith, some arguments in the little book’s favor:

1. Only one hobbit.

There’s a reason Tolkien begins both novels by getting his hobbit protagonists out of the Shire. Hobbits, though possessed of many admirable traits, can be kind of a drag, especially in large numbers. One is plenty. Four is too many. After twelve hundred pages of “The Lord of the Rings,” I’d had just about enough of the hobbits’ endless pining for home and their tiresome whingeing about not having a second breakfast. Particularly grating is Sam Gamgee, the loyal, kind-hearted servant who accompanies Frodo all the way to Mt. Doom—and insists on calling him “Mr. Frodo” the entire time. Mindlessly devoted and masochistically self-denying, he is held up as the truest expression of hobbithood. No thanks. I find Bilbo, the hero of the earlier book, a far more engaging character. While he does yearn for the comforts of the Shire during his journey to the Lonely Mountain, he is no straight arrow. He’s an opportunist, willing to fudge the rules when it suits him. He outwits Gollum with a not-quite-kosher riddle. He steals the Arkenstone from Smaug’s hoard and uses it as a bargaining chip; and he hides the magic ring from his companions as long as he can. Next time I re-read “The Lord of the Rings,” I am sure to ask myself, What would Bilbo do?

2. Lots of dwarves.

I propose a rule: the ratio of dwarves to hobbits is directly proportional to the quality of the tale. Wagner and Walt Disney understood this. Pompous and irritable, industrious yet bumbling, dwarves are much more enjoyable to read about than hobbits. Though motivated always by gold, they are makers as well as takers. Skilled blacksmiths, miners, and engineers, they are responsible for many of the wonders of Middle Earth. Moria is to a hobbit hole as the Pyramids are to a thatched-roof cottage. There is just one dwarf in “The Lord of the Rings”: Gimli. He is the son of Gloin, one of Bilbo’s companions in “The Hobbit.” (Gloin does make a brief appearance at the Council of Elrond, but that hardly counts.) Having one dwarf in your epic fantasy novel is like having one acrobat in a circus. You need a troupe! Poor Gimli is charged not only with protecting the ringbearer, but also with providing much of the comic relief in the trilogy. By contrast, “The Hobbit” features a dozen dwarves and is the richer for it. Who can’t sympathize with a group of grumpy, bearded refugees who have been evicted from their homeland by a greedy despot? The fact that they squabble, refuse to listen to directions, and end up starting a war only makes them more fun to read about.

Doonesbury — Then what?