Category Archives: In Our Time

Defining concepts downward

30 Replies

See the headline on today’s front page?

Which is better —
insider or outsider?

It refers, of course, to the superintendent of education race. It’s an idiotic question, but I certainly don’t blame my colleagues down in the newsroom for that. They are reflecting the times in which they are editing. Today, such a question regarding the head of something as complex as our schools system is … perfectly "reasonable."

You see, we have defined "reasonable" down to an absurdly low level in our politics today. Even the use of "insider" and "outsider" to describe this race is misleading, because we’ve distorted those concepts as well.

Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ran as "outsiders," and both had been governors — Reagan was the governor of our largest state, which is larger and richer than most nations. They had been chief executives before; they had some clue what the job entailed. They were real outsiders because they weren’t part of the establishment. That establishment chewed up Carter and spit him out; Reagan triumphed over it.

Karen Floyd most certainly isn’t an "outsider" by those standards. She’s had limited administrative experience in the private sector during her job-hopping career, and none in the public. She doesn’t know anything more than a randomly chosen person off the street knows about education, and less than many you might find that way. She hasn’t been working on improving schools from the outside — running advocacy groups or participating in think tanks or establishing and successfully running private alternatives. Maybe she plays a leading role in the PTA, but if she’s touted that, I’ve missed it.

The bizarre thing is, by the usual standards of "outsider," Jim Rex is it. Most of his career has been spent in higher ed — both public and private colleges — working on improving schools from the outside. He’s found innovative ways to improve the teaching pool and training, and he’s got plenty of ideas — based on actual experience — for making greater improvements.

No, today, "insider" means "someone who has relevant experience of some kind" and "outsider" means, "doesn’t know jack about the job." And the latter, in our anti-intellectual, anti-expert, Reality TV-soaked society, has enormous appeal.

I don’t understand why. But then, I expect words to mean what they mean, and voters to behave rationally. So don’t mind me; I’m deluded.

A state of one

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At first, I thought Tommy Moore was expressing a difference of opinion between himself and John Edwards. But then, I find that Mr. Edwards apparently doesn’t go around talking about "Two Americas" any more, but approaches the same theme from a different, more positive, more forward-looking angle. Well, good for him. Good for both of them, I suppose. I never liked Mr. Edwards’ former shtick.

Yes, we write frequently about the "Two South Carolinas," but we define that term very differently. We talk about the profound economic differences that exist between urban and rural, black and white, I-85 vs. I-95, and so forth. Most folks do fine in our state, but we are held back as a people by the large swathes of poverty. Our goal in using such rhetoric — and we’ll be doing so again Sunday — is to get the affluent interested in policies that will help the less fortunate.

When John Edwards talked about "Two Americas" in the 2004 campaign, he meant a few super-rich folks (such as himself) on one side, and the vast majority of Americans on the other. It was about stirring up the resentment of the middle class, and getting it to vote for him. Very different idea, leading to a very different intended result.

The gloves come off

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Just when you thought you had figured out Jim Rex as the mild-mannered-professor type, this comes out on his blog. Apparently, an alternative paper finally printed the stuff that everybody’s been muttering about Karen Floyd — her three marriages, etc. — and Mr. Rex wants to make sure you don’t miss it.Rex3

Mrs. Floyd has been worried that her personal life would be used against her from the beginning. I
think it was a major consideration she had to overcome in deciding to run. She made it through the five-way primary unscathed — except for all the talk, which didn’t reach most of the voters.

Now it’s out, and I find myself wondering who will be hurt more by it — Karen Floyd, or Jim Rex. I have to say it raises certain chivalrous hackles in me. A gentleman doesn’t speak publicly about a lady’s past. But, trapped in that Jane Austen mode of thinking as I am, I find myself wanting to give Mr. Rex some benefit of doubt. Do you think it’s actually written by him? Do you think he even reads it? Is Zeke Stokes or somebody acting on his own?

Still, Mr. Rex is responsible for it, just as Andre Bauer is responsible for the MySpace site he says he has nothing to do with.

So what do you think? Does this make you think less of Karen? Or of Jim?

Some quick attaboys

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Leadership

Sorry to have been absent so much of the week. I’ve been tied up in marathon meetings — I’m about to go into another all-day one (administrative ones, related to the newspaper’s budget and such) — and have had to spend breaks and evenings racing to do the basic tasks involved in getting the editorial pages out.

But until I can get freed up a little, here are a couple of quick items for my dear readers to cogitate over and discuss in my absence. I’d like to offer thanks and congratulations to:

  1. Sens. Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John Warner for having won an apparent victory in favor of the American Way. Sure, they didn’t get every thing, but that’s the way compromise works. And they seem to have held their ground as to the principles that mattered most. Thanks to them, the rule of law is finally being established with regard to the treatment of prisoners, and the legislative branch is a little closer to playing its proper role in the War on Terror.
  2. Sen. Tommy Moore, for having acted with uncharacteristic boldness to make a couple of000moore_3 important points: First, that candidates for governor should not ally themselves with political
    actions intended to hurt the state’s economy. Second, that the inconsistent and ineffective NAACP boycott accomplishes nothing at all for South Carolina. I would add that it accomplishes nothing but the opposite of its stated purpose. It puts a solution on the Confederate "battle flag" farther away, not closer. And make no mistake. The only solution is to put dead relics of our most tragic past in museums or bronze monuments, not to fly them as though they were alive and had positive relevance to who we are as a people today.

Back to meetings…

Unity column

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Towers12
When will we unite
to win this fight?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WHEN OUR board discussed what to say upon the fifth anniversary of the devastating terror attacks on American soil, I had to be talked into taking the approach we did: Examining what we have done and failed to do in response, right here at home.
    For me, the domestic situation is more depressing than conditions in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a matter of expectations.
    When we sent our troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, I knew we were beginning a long and costly endeavor that, even with solid support among the U.S. electorate, would take longer than the time we’ve given it so far. While much that has happened over there has dismayed and even horrified me, little has surprised me.
    But the reaction over here has been a bitter disappointment, made more painful because I had hoped so ardently for something so much better.
    In late October 2001, I wrote:
    “On Sept. 11, amid all the horror, I started seeing and hearing things that gave me a new hope. I felt like the American spirit was maybe, just maybe, awakening from a long and fitful slumber. I knew that defeating this new evil that faced our country would be an all-consuming task that would leave us little energy for the petty bickering that had come to dominate public life. And I believed we would most certainly defeat it. We would rise to the occasion, and in the end we — and the world as a whole — would be better.”
    I haven’t had the opportunity to go to Iraq, and I don’t know how well I could assess the overall situation if I did — a battle looks different to each individual in it. I don’t trust the accounts of the Cassandras and Pollyannas who would have us either despair or pretend everything is all right. The voices I seek are those that speak of what we need to do to achieve success, starting from where we are right now.
    Such voices are all too rare, although sometimes they pipe up in unexpected places. I was pleased last week to see veteran scribe Joe Galloway, who up to now has done little but carp and criticize over the war effort, use his contacts among military leaders to pull together advice on how to win. The same day I read that, I read a column by Newt Gingrich — the very embodiment of pointless partisan infighting — that honestly analyzed grave mistakes made by leaders of his own party, and prescribed stern remedies.
    The best part of that piece was this quote from Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
    We must indeed think in new ways, but we don’t. And no one among us is blameless.
    Most congressional Republicans give little more than lip service to winning the war. They devote themselves to tax cuts, while at the same time spending at levels previously unimagined. They, along with the president, have not acted as though they acknowledge the crucial connection between the war on terror and our insanely self-destructive energy habits. The president himself has left little hope for leadership — the kind all can follow — until his replacement takes office in 2009.
    The Democrats, rather than acting like a principled opposition and proposing the kinds of sacrifices that would be necessary to free us from foreign oil despots, have chosen instead to demagogue over gasoline prices (which obviously aren’t yet high enough to persuade us to conserve). In the first months and years after 9/11, they seemed stunned into having no ideas to present whatsoever. Now they seem energized by what they tout as our failures in battle, almost as if they welcome such outcomes.
    But you have to understand: The priority for Democrats as a party is not winning the war — it’s winning control of Congress in November.
    The priority of Republicans in general isn’t winning the war, either: It’s stopping the Democrats.
    I wouldn’t give two cents to affect the outcome of that pointless struggle either way. If I could, I’d get rid of most of them and start over, stocking the Congress with people whose priority is asserting and defending the values and interests we hold in common.
    The sin of the rest of us is letting the parties get away with it, while our best and bravest spill their blood on behalf of a people who have done too little to demonstrate that we deserve it.
    Five years ago, for a brief time, we were better than we are today. When will we “disenthrall ourselves,” and this time for good?

Towers7

Sunday grownups column

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Dreaming of a world in which
grownups are in charge again
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
REMEMBER when everything from politics to marketing to fashion to entertainment was aimed at grownups?
    Take television: While we kids owned Saturday morning (“Mighty Mouse” and such), prime time was keyed to the buttoned-down square world of people who had come up during the Depression and reached maturity — a sort of maturity most of us would never know — during the last war that this nation could get it together enough to see all the way through.
    “Popular music” was made by these old guys in suits with short, slick hair who looked like they could as easily have been bankers. Perry Como. Andy Williams. The height of hipdom was Dean Martin. He showed he was daring and edgy by walking around with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Pretty sad. (A friend and I would compete as to who could more closely lampoon him: “Oooh, ah think ah’ll go over an’ sit on da cowch…”).
    Every once in a while, they’d throw us a bone. Ed Sullivan, the squarest guy who ever lived, would on rare occasion devote five minutes of his hour presenting something “for you youngsters.” But when he said that, we never knew whether he would be bringing out the Rolling Stones or Topo Gigio, the talking mouse. These morsels were presented within an adult context, as curiosities from an alien culture that adults could smile down upon indulgently.
    Once, these brothers called Smothers tried to have a show that was sort of different. But the grownups put a stop to that.
    So much for popular culture.
    Take politics. It was so quiet and low-key that for the longest time, I didn’t even know it existed. Ike had always been president. (I was born in 1953.) Then this shocking thing happened in 1960. Two guys stood before the nation asking us (asking the grownups) to pick between them to determine which one would replace Ike as president. It came down to a popularity contest. That brought the presidency down a bit in my estimation. Before that, if I had been familiar with the phrase, I would have assumed Ike was “president by the grace of God.”
    I guess it never occurred to me that there was an alternative to Ike being president because back then, even political opponents accepted that that the president was the president, and were content to wait for the next election to have their say.
    And when they had their say, they were so grown-up about it. No mindless pandering to voters’ selfish impulses. Go back and read excerpts from the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Forget how they looked. Their words were so lofty, so respectful, so intellectual, so well-informed. They debated like… grownups. It was weird.
    Time passed, and I went off to college, just as things were starting to change a bit. (It’s a little-acknowledged fact that for most of us, the ’60s really didn’t happen until the ’70s. Go back and look at high school yearbooks; you’ll see what I mean.) Then I got married, went to work, had kids, and suddenly it was the ’80s.
    MTV. I couldn’t believe it. It was like the very best few seconds that you might have squeezed out of a year of boring television in the early ’60s — only 24 hours a day, every day of the year. But I didn’t have much time for it. Work, mouths to feed. One maturing experience after another.
    And then the millennium passed, and I looked around again, and the kids had taken over. In the grocery line, I was surrounded by headlines that would have insulted a 12-year-old’s intelligence in 1962. I flipped through the channels now available on television, and there was nothing on that any grown man would want to see. OK, there was “House.” But he was overwhelmed by programs that put such an ironic twist on the word “reality” that I guess it just goes over my head. Or under it.
    (I did see one recently that my very grownup wife likes, but only because she likes anything with dancing. All you could hear throughout the show was the kind of screaming that you heard in small bits when The Beatles came on. Only this adolescent keening wasn’t for anything special or exciting; they screamed for everybody. They screamed when people said hello. Here’s the really weird part: What was this show about? People doing the fox trot. It was like Lawrence Welk with semi-nudity.)
    Once, we played war with toy guns, and if we were really daring, we played marbles “for keeps.” Now, kids join gangs to play war with real guns. For keeps.
    How did those who think and act on a childish level get to be in charge? I never got my turn.
    That’s why I celebrated last weekend’s aggressive crackdown on underage drinking in an editorial headlined, “The grownups strike back in Five Points.” For once, maturity was asserting itself as dominant over the random raging of the ungoverned id. It gave me hope. I dared to dream.
    In my dream, a swarm of determined grownups swoop down on the Democrats and Republicans, toss them all aside, and put up a couple of thinking adults for us to choose between for president.
    They compete to see who can say the wisest and most mature things. They tell us we have to stop burning all that oil, and that we have to pay taxes to help come up with an alternative. They tell us that we have to accept the fact that we are the strongest country in the world, and that with that power comes responsibility. They tell us there’s no free lunch — on Social Security, Medicare or anything else. If we build in a flood plain or on a sandy beach, they tell us we should have known better, and maybe this will teach us something. They’ll say the FDA should regulate nicotine. They tell us to stop whining, sit up straight and eat our vegetables.
    I’d vote happily for one of them. And if the other won, I’d respect that. I’d be a man about it.

What’s all this then about immigration?

308 Replies

AntiillegalIt’s not what you think; this was shot in New Jersey.

Greatest threat to U.S.
is immigration? Since when?

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

WITH CONGRESS on break, U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett has been meeting with his 3rd District constituents. So what’s on their minds?
“Immigration” comes in first.
Second, he says, is “immigration.” Third is immigration. It’s also fourth.
And he supposed that “the war” maybe came in fifth. I’m sure our troops over there will appreciate making the Top Ten.
He admitted that he was being “a little facetious.” The war is “a cloud” casting its shadow over everything political. But there are no clouds on the stark immigration landscape. There, you’ll find nothing but a blinding, hot interrogation lamp surrounded by shadows. If you give the wrong answer, there are a lot of GOP voters out there ready to cast you into the everlasting darkness.
“Wrong,” of course, can vary, depending on whether you’re a lobbyist for the big business types who have been the GOP’s bread and butter for generations, or one of the salt-of-the-earth folk who crowded into the Big Tent in recent decades and created the vaunted GOP majority.
The main question I have on the subject is one that neither Rep. Barrett nor anyone else has answered to my satisfaction:
How did this issue become such a big deal all of a sudden? What changed? We’ve had Mexican tiendas in our neighborhoods, even in South Carolina, for much of the past decade. For even longer, it’s been hard to communicate on a construction site without a working knowledge of Spanish. Our last two presidents could hardly put together a Cabinet for all the illegals their nominees had employed as nannies.
Over the last 10 or 20 years, there’s been a huge influx. But what changed in the past 12 or 15 Sombreromonths? As near as I can tell, looking at the real world out there, nothing. But in the unreal world of politics, it’s as though, sometime during the summer of 2005 or so, a huge portion of the electorate suddenly woke up from a Rip Van Winkle catnap and said: “Whoa! Why are all these people speaking Spanish?”
There were always a few who considered illegal immigration Issue One. On the left, you had union types concerned about cheap labor depressing wages and working conditions. On the right, you had culture warriors furious at hearing anything other than English spoken in the U.S. of A.
On both sides, drifting amid the high-sounding words about fairness and the rule of law, there was a disturbing whiff of 19th century Know-Nothingism.
I had one or two people who e-mailed me about it regularly, always furious at us for taking the “wrong” position on the issue — even though, until it moved to the front burner back in the spring, we didn’t have a position on it.
Nor did Mr. Barrett consider it a priority, until late 2004. At least, none of the thousands of news outlets whose archives are available on Lexis-Nexis report his having a burning concern.
During the past year, his name and the word “immigration” showed up 53 times. In the previous year, only 20 times. In all previous years, 40 times. Back when he was first running for Congress in 2002, he was talking about keeping out terrorists, mainly from such places as Iran and Iraq. In fact, opponent Jim Klauber blasted him for paying too much attention to countries “where terrorists come from,” while ignoring “the greatest problem in the 3rd Congressional District” — which, to him, was illegal immigration from Mexico.
But now, and for the last couple of years, Mr. Barrett has stood foursquare behind the House’s “enforcement first” approach. He demonstrated his deep concern most recently by visiting the border personally, just before coming home to see constituents. So when he got an earful, he was prepared.
But I wasn’t, probably because I don’t watch TV and therefore haven’t had it explained to me by Bill O’Reilly. I still find myself wondering: Where did all these angry people come from? The ones who weren’t even talking about this issue a year ago, but now promise to toss Lindsey Graham out of the Senate for actually recognizing that this issue is really complicated.
How can anyone see this issue in black-and-white terms? Hey, I want to see the laws enforced, too. But I know that a nation that can’t find one guy in the mountains of Afghanistan isn’t going to round up 10 to 20 million people walking the streets of the freest, least-controlled nation in the world.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to round up most of them. The Nazis probably could have achieved a success rate of 80 or 90 percent. And it’s probably possible to build a 2,000-mile fence that would be more-or-less impassable. China did it.
But at what cost? I’m not even talking moral or spiritual cost, in the sense of “what kind of nation would that make us?” I’ll let somebody else preach that sermon. I’m talking hard cash.
Look at the national debt. Look at our inadequate presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Check out the rising power of nations such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, whom we are making impervious to international pressure with our insatiable thirst for petrol. Note that we don’t have the military assets to make Iran take us seriously when we suggest it should stop working on nukes for terrorists, or else. Or else what?
Let’s talk priorities, folks, not fantasies. The “invasion” that endangers this country isn’t a bunch of people looking to (gasp) sweep our Wal-Marts to feed their families. It’s Londoners getting on a flight at Heathrow with bogus tubes of Prell in their carry-ons.
Illegal immigration is a serious problem, when it gets to where you have 12 million aliens you can’t account for. Having our labor market, wages and working conditions distorted by a huge supply of cheap, illegal labor is also a serious problem. So is the fact that our neighbors suffer such crushing poverty that they will risk their lives coming here just to have their labor exploited.
But not one of these things is the most urgent problem facing this country. Not a year ago, and not now.

Proimmigrant

What would Sgt. Hulka say?

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Hulka
As we all know, one of the first things the iconic Sgt. Hulka said to the new recruits upon their arrival at basic training in the immortal "Stripes" was:

Men, welcome to the United States Army. I’m Sergeant Hulka. I’m your
drill sergeant. Before we proceed any further, we gotta get something
straight. Your mamas are not here to take care of you now. It’s just
you, me, and Uncle Sam. And before I leave you, you’re gonna find out
that me and Uncle Sam are one in the same.

Well what would he have to say about this caption from The Associated Press, which goes with the above photo?

Pfc. Kimbery Brown,37, left, and her 18-year-old son Pfc. Dereck Noe, right, of Boone NC., embrace after they graduated together during a ceremony Friday, Aug. 18, 2006, at the Army’s training facility at Fort Jackson, in Columbia, S.C.

How about a game show?

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Rob Schaller, ETV’s director of communications, said the public television network was airing the debate mentioned in my last post to help it be "known as a place people can turn to for coverage of issues that are important to them."

So does that mean Messrs. Rainey and Ravenel are going to discuss their competing theories as to what really happened to JonBenet?

Smoking column

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Good news: We get to smoke for free.
Bad news: We have no choice

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor

WHY IS it called "secondhand smoke"? What’’s "secondhand" about it? When I find myself gagging on it, and look around for the source, it’’s always coming straight from the cigarette. The smoker’’s not using the smoke first before sharing it with me. Most of the time, he’’s not puffing on the thing at all. He’’s just sitting there, letting the tendrils of carcinogenic particulates pollute the room.Smoking

Let’’s give smokers this much credit –— when they do take a pull on their coffin nails, they usually refrain from blowing it right in our faces.

So there’’s nothing secondhand about it. Those of us who "don’’t smoke" are getting the full, genuine, original article, fresh and straight off the rack. Face it, folks –— we’’re smoking. The good news is, we’re not even having to pay for it. The bad news is, we don’’t have any say in the matter.

Now, the term "passive smoke" makes some sense. When you consider that most people are "nonsmokers," but all of them at some time or other have to breathe the stuff anyway, it becomes clear that most who smoke aren’’t doing it on purpose.

Fortunately, the majority has in recent years become a lot less docile. As a result, fewer and fewer of us are forced to work long hours in smoke-saturated factories, stores and offices— the way I was when I first came to work at this newspaper, a fact that cost me thousands in medical bills (even with insurance).

Notice how often I’’m slipping into the first-person here. This makes me uncomfortable, which is why you’’ve probably never read an entire column from me on the subject of smoking, even though it has been for many years my bane. I’’m suspicious of other people who advocate things that would directly benefit them or some group they belong to, so I avoid it myself. When I wrote a column that dealt with my rather extreme food allergies, I spent much of the piece trying to rationalize my self-absorption.

But the subject of public smoking has been brought to the fore, and the time has come to speak out. There’’s a new surgeon general’’s report. The University of South Carolina has moved virtually to ban it. On the state and local levels, there are moves afoot to eliminate smoking from bars and restaurants –— the last broad refuges of the gray haze.

It’’s time to speak up. In fact, I wonder why the majority was so diffident for so long. I guess it was that classic American attitude, "Live and let others fill our air with deadly fumes." An anecdote:

A restaurant in Greenville. Our waiter came up and asked in a whisper whether we’’d mind if a gentleman who smokes were seated next to us. You see, he explained, the petitioner was in a wheelchair, and that was the only table available that would be accessible to him. Granted, this was the nonsmoking section, but if we could accommodate him….

Uh, well, gee. A guy in a wheelchair. Poor fella. It’s not like I can’’t smell the smoke from across the room anyway ("nonsmoking areas" are a joke). I started thinking aloud: "I suppose… I mean… if there is no alternative… I’’m allergic to it and all, but if you have to…."

At this point, the waiter began to back off, and said –— with a tone of deferential reproach that must have taken him years to perfect –— "That’s all right. I’’ll just ask the other gentleman to wait for another table."

Gosh. I felt like a heel. I pictured a hungry, forlorn, Dickensian cripple, waiting for some kind soul to let him have a bit of nourishment. Tiny Tim grown up, being dealt another cruel blow by life. As the waiter started to back away from our table, I was about to relent… when suddenly, a rather obvious point hit me: "Or," I said, "he could just not smoke."

Why did he have to smoke if he sat in the section full of people who had specifically asked not to breathe smoke while dining? Easy answer: He didn’’t. Nor did he need to spit, curse, pick his nose or break wind.

OK, I got off-message. It’s about public health, not offensiveness. As the surgeon general reported, even brief exposure to tobacco smoke "has immediate adverse effects" on the body. (I knew that before, since smoke causes my bronchial tubes to start closing the instant they make contact. I’’m lucky that way. I don’’t have to wait 30 years to get sick.)

Smoke_pipeBut you know what? Even if it were only a matter of being offensive, even if it were nothing more than putting a bad, hazy smell into the air, there would be no excuse for one person imposing it upon even one other person.

We’’re not talking about one person’’s interests being set against another’s. It’s not in anybody’’s interests for anybody to smoke –— unless you make money off that human weakness.

Take that guy in Greenville. He was already in a wheelchair! I’m supposed to waive the rules so that he can make himself sicker, and us with him? What madness.

It’’s not even in the interests of many bars or restaurants –— although, if nonsmoking establishments become the norm, I can foresee a time in which there would be a niche market for smoking dens.

And I’’d prefer for the market to sort that out. I am no libertarian, yet even I hesitate to pass laws to ban smoking in public places. But the market has not addressed the matter to the extent you would expect. Why?

Richland County Councilman Joe McEachern says a restaurateur recently told him, "Joe, I’ve got some great customers who are smoking; I can’t personally put up a sign that says ‘’no smoking.’’" But if there were a law, his business would benefit because the demand for clean-air dining is greater than he can meet now: "I can’’t get enough room for nonsmoking."

OK, so if most people don’’t smoke, and it’’s to everybody’’s benefit to clear the air, why can’’t we work something out?

Maybe this is why: I still feel kind of bad about the guy in the wheelchair. But I shouldn’’t.

It doesn’t know what I’LL do

25 Replies

This was an interesting piece in the NYT yesterday. (And I would have posted it yesterday, but I kept looking for it at the WSJ site, thinking I’d read it in their print edition, and only realized my mistake today).

Headlined, "The Internet Knows What You’ll Do Next," it discussed the idea that … well, I’ll let the NYT explain:

    A FEW years back, a technology writer named John Battelle began talking about how the Internet had made it possible to predict the future. When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions.
     They typed in "Alaskan cruise" because they were thinking about taking one or "baby names" because they were planning on needing one. If somebody were to add up all this information, it would produce a pretty good notion of where the world was headed, of what was about to get hot and what was going out of style.
    Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard, wasn’t the first person to figure this out. But he did find a way to describe the digital crystal ball better than anyone else had. He called it "the database of intentions."
    The collective history of Web searches, he wrote on his blog in late 2003, was "a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends."

Scary, huh? I mean, if you’re privacy advocate. I generally don’t worry too much about that stuff. I mean, I suppose I want to be left alone as much as the next guy, but if the government wants to include my phone records in a database that helps us catch terrorists, I figure it’s the least I can do for the war effort. Have at it.

I worry even less about what such a database of intentions would reveal about me. Of course, Battelle is talking about a collective database to track trends among millions of users (he sounds a bit like Obi Wan explaining The Force). But obviously, the same thing can apply — and already does apply, among marketers — on the micro scale to individuals.

Well, anybody who tries to read my intentions is going to get pretty confused. Any prophetic analysis based on my footprints on the Web would show that I have a greater-than-usual interest in:

Good luck predicting the future from that, Merlin.

A Decent Respect

59 Replies

France
Everybody can quote from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. You don’t often hear the first part cited.

That helps make it fresh each time I read it. This time, I was struck by the last words of the intro:

… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

As you know, there is no greater supporter of our nation’s involvement in Iraq than I. But I’ve also been bitterly disappointed by mistakes the Bush administration makes, and continues to make, in prosecuting the war.

I do believe that ultimately, the United States and the "coalition of the willing" should go ahead and do what needs to be done, with or without the blessings of the likes of France and Germany. But I believe also that the administration could have done more to show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" than it has done. That’s one reason why I think Donald Rumsfeld should have been dumped a long time ago.

Too many of the president’s supporters say "to hell with the rest of the world." They shouldn’t. Yes, we must do what we must do. But we doom ourselves to ultimate failure, and loss of the leadership position that makes us effective, if we don’t show some of the humility in the face of our fellow men that came naturally to those brave souls who signed the Declaration.

They weren’t asking anybody’s permission. But they did want to be understood, and explained themselves eloquently.

We could do with a lot more such eloquence today. The two photos, both taken today, show the options. We’re much better off, and much better able to fulfill our mission in the world, if we are seen the way we are in the photo at top — a statue of Jefferson being unveiled in Paris. The picture below shows a protest in Denmark over Guantanamo. Anything we do to encourage the latter view of us if harmful to the United States, and to the rest of the world — which, whether it wants to or not, depends upon us and the choices we make.

Denmark

Good thing I’m not blogging today

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Here are some of the items I would have posted yesterday had I been blogging. Which I’m not. ‘Cause I’m on vacation. Anyway:

  • We wanted to get an early start since we were heading all the way back to S.C., but while my wife was downstairs getting the free breakfast I decided to check my investments. My portfolio consists — that is, consisted — of about $1,300 worth of Knight Ridder stock. I’ve written of this brilliant move on my part before. Anyway, we ended up being delayed about half an hour, because I discovered that, instead of having been converted to cash in the sale of the company earlier this week, my investment had simply … disappeared. I had about $67 left in my e-trade account. First I got an Indian guy on the phone (he didn’t tell me his name, but if I had asked, he probably would have said it was "Steve"), who passed me to somebody else, who said I needed to talk to a "professional," who said I needed to talk to another "professional." I think the last guy I talked to said something — money, negotiable securities, something — should show up in my account in the next couple of days. I shrugged, and we got on the road. By the way, if you need investment advice, my services are available for a fee.
  • Before putting away the laptop, though, I checked to see if there was anyplace good to stop on the way for coffee. There was a Starbucks in Fredericksburg, a couple of hours out. (I have confessed in the past about my hateful Starbucks jones, which makes at least one of my coffee-drinking children ashamed of me.) It was at a place called "Central Park." I decided I could wait that long. You couldn’t miss Central Park, but it was very, very easy to miss something located within Central Park. I remember Alan Kahn talking about places where they had something like what he had in mind for the Village at Sandhill. This had to be one of them (I’m not in a position to check archives at the moment). This place was like the Village at Sandhill multiplied by Harbison to the power of the Mall of America — street after street of shops, strips and big boxes. The general layout was like Broadway at the Beach — winding lanes and such — but it went on and on and on. You know how terrorists dream of 72 virgins? This is what Burroughs and Chapin dream about. Only blind luck enabled me to find Starbucks in all that. I did stop and ask directions. Guess where? Where would be the last place in the world where you would be likely to find people who knew the way to a trendy-yuppie place like Starbucks? That’s right. Wal-Mart. I first asked the greeter, and when she looked up and had only one tooth in her head, my heart sank. I asked another employee, and she gave me very confident directions, but they were entirely wrong. Fortunately, I ran into it while on the way to the place she had pointed out. If was only a couple of hundred yards from Wal-Mart.
  • I stopped by the battlefield in Petersburg, because one of my great-great grandfathers had died there. I called my uncle from the visitors center to get him to remind me what unit he was with. He couldn’t remember, and my cousin who’s the genealogist was off someplace. But he did tell me that we had determined that great-great grandad had not died at Petersburg,Crater_1 but at a place called "Kingsburg." The ranger in the visitor’s center had never heard of it. So we went off to have a look at the Crater before getting back on the road.
  • The Crater was disappointing. I expected something about half a mile across. This wasn’t big enough to be a cellar for a small house. Ol’ Henry Pleasants didn’t use as much dynamite as Butch Cassidy, I suppose. Anyway, it was a glorious victory for South Carolinians, as the plaque I photographed (and will post when I get back to the house) attests. But it was a godawful mess. Forgive my levity. I kept saying to my wife as we drove through, looking for stop number 8, "Here we go, just breezing by, and all those men poured out their lifeblood atScplaque_1 every one of these stops." I am capable of being sober at times.
  • OK, this one’s weird. Anybody ever read The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove? If you haven’t, I’m not going to describe it to you, because it will lower your opinion of my reading tastes. But it’s really a lot better than it sounds. Anyway, it’s an alternative history novel, in which the South wins the war. Instead of being the famous man who created the Crater at Petersburg, Henry Pleasants appears in it as a POW released by the Confederacy after the war, who decides to settle in Nash County, NC. His Crater idea does occur to him in the novel, but within a completely different context. Anyway, Lt. Col. Pleasants was captured at the battle of Bealeton. Not familiar with that one? That’s because it only happened in the novel, after the course of history changed from what we know. But this novel, which I’ve read more than once, kept screwing up my sense of real history as I drove through Virginia and N.C. As we drove by the exit to Bealeton, I started to tell my wife, in a professorial tone, how this was the place where … and caught myself just in time, realizing that it never actually happened. Then I saw the Crater made by the real Col. Pleasants. Then we’re driving through N.C., and we enter Nash County. Then we pass by the exit for Nashville, where Nate Caudell lived. If I had seen a sign to Rivington, I really would have freaked out. You have to have read the book to understand that last one.
  • How come, when you’re looking for the junction between one Interstate and another, they don’t give you a little warning so you can be on the lookout for it? Paranoid about missing my turn, I kept looking obsessively at all the signs for about 50 miles. I wanted to get off 95 and onto 40 to Wilmington. You know when the gummint finally deigned to put up a sign telling me it was coming? Two miles away. If I had been in one of those semiconscious zones you get into while driving for just two minutes, I could have missed it. I didn’t, but still. Don’t you think they should tell a guy a little earlier.
  • I am never going to Wilmington again for the rest of my life. All we wanted to do was turn onto 17 and head down to the Strand. Easy, right? Not around there. I turned off looking for the waterfront areas where there might be a nice seafood place. We found nothing, and then could not get back onto 17. Really. I have a great sense of direction, if nothing else, but it was useless in that place. We were lost for an hour. Once I found the bloody bridge, though, it was easy. I was so glad to get out of North Carolina, and back home. So was my wife, and she’s actually from Tennessee.
  • They don’t even know how to have a beach town up there in N.C. The place was totally dead, and just looked like any other Southern town. As soon as we crossed the line, we were greeted by a fireworks place, then restaurants, tacky tourist traps, all sorts of crazy, bustling traffic and an Eagles or Wings on every block. People deride the Redneck Riviera, but it’s the Beach to me, and felt as homey and welcoming as my blue recliner at home. If only I had packed those ratty old slippers of mine.

Well, that’s enough. Like I said, good thing I’m not blogging today.

Oscar and Ann Coulter

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Man, I thought I’d never write a post with "Ann Coulter" in the headline — the wars of the ideologues interest me only to the extent that I sometimes find them morbidly fascinating. As in, "See, that’s what wrong with the country!"

I must have been in one of those moods, because I finally gave in to the fact that she had beenCoulter mentioned repeatedly in recent days in comments on this blog, and always in a context that suggested that everybody else but me knew why she was the subject of the day. You see, I’ve been sort of busy right here in South Carolina. In any case, I’ve never read anything by Ms. Coulter (does she mind being called that, by the way?). Nor have I seen her on the telly, but I’ll just bet she’s one of those shouting heads I don’t see because of not having cable.

Anyway, I Googled her (and is it OK if I say that?). And I’m guessing the reason folks are talking about her so much has something to do with this. She must have really gone over the line if the National Review is saying this about her:

Apparently, in Ann’s mind, she constitutes the thin blonde line between freedom and tyranny…

Oops, no. I see that it must be something else, because that’s from way back in 2001. It must be this
— which I found on the old-fashioned wire service. If it was something else, perhaps y’all can enlighten me, if "enlighten" is the word.

But more interesting to me, and the only reason I am invoking the woman’s name, is that I clicked on her official site, and checked her archived writings. I immediately clicked on one of the more inflammatory-looking headlines, and found this. No, not the article — I didn’t read that. I’m talking about the little ad at the top, the one that says:

Republican Oscar Lovelace
The Next Governor of South Carolina
Mark Your Calendar, June 13 Primary

You click on it, and you get his Web site.

Interesting choice of an advertising venue. I would think there were better ones for reaching a South Carolina readership, but what do I know?

How about, “Let’s Beat Up Burnett and Beckerman?”

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You know that stuff that Sweet Virginia needed to scrape right off her shoes (sorry, no links, you have to get it)? They must have been hip-deep in it when they thought up this one.

By far the most unlikely star of a prospective fall situation comedy
is that still-active lead singer of the Rolling Stones, who has signed
on to an ABC pilot for its fall schedule. Just to increase the degree
of unlikelihood, Mr. Jagger shot his scenes for the New York-based
pilot in a hotel room in Auckland, New Zealand, last week.

That
was the culmination of a saga at least as whimsical as the premise of
the show, which, for now, anyway, is titled "Let’s Rob Mick Jagger."

The writing team that came up with the idea, Rob Burnett, long David Letterman’s
executive producer, and his partner, Jon Beckerman, had previously
created the NBC comedy-drama "Ed." As Mr. Burnett outlined the tale in
a telephone interview, he and Mr. Beckerman "wondered if there was a
way do a serialized comedy — something like a comedy version of ‘Lost’
or ’24.’ "

Hatched in numerous meetings, the concept centered on
a janitor for a prominent New York building, to be played by the
character actor Donal Logue.
Down on his luck, the janitor sees a celebrity on television wallowing
in his wealth during a tour of his new Manhattan penthouse. Enlisting a
crew of similar ordinary but frustrated accomplices, the janitor
conceives a plot to rob the big shot’s apartment, a story line that
would unfold over a 24-episode television season.

Well, for one thing, serial comedy’s been done. Check the original BBC version of "The Office," which is highly unlikely to be topped by this high-concept freak.

For another thing — and this is the awful part — if I thought Mick would be nearly as much fun in this as he was in "Freejack" (which is on a list I haven’t yet completed of "Top Five Cheesy Movies that are Fun to Watch"), I might even tune in. For the pilot, anyway.

Morbid curiosity will take one a long way. Television counts on that.

‘Go for it’ column

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Bulb_011_1Energy independence?
We only have to decide to go for it

    “From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. It’s not a miracle. We just decided to go.”
            — Tom Hanks, as Astronaut
            Jim Lovell in “Apollo 13”

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I REMEMBER when this country would “just decide to go” and do something that had never been done — something so hard that it seemed impossible — and then just go.
    I was not yet 16 when men first stepped into the gray talcum of Tranquillity Base, and I didn’t know that I was living through the last days of the age of heroic national effort. I thought the muscular, confident idealism of World War II veterans such as John Kennedy was the norm. JFK said let’s go to the moon. It didn’t matter that nothing like it had ever been done, or that the technologies had not yet been invented. We just said OK, let’s do it.
    We built rockets. Brave men stepped forward to sit atop them in hissing, flashing, buzzing, wired-up sardine cans. Slide-ruler nerds who feared no challenge designed all the gadgets that went into the rockets and made them fly true. The rest of us paid the astronomical bills, and suspended our lives to watch each launch, in fuzzy black-and-white. We held our breaths together as though we were the ones waiting to be blasted to glory, live or die.
    And in a sense, we were. That was us. We were there.
    Why did we stop doing things like that? Where did we lose the confidence? When did we lose interest in working together? How did we lose the will?
    Was it the bitter end of Vietnam, which caused us to swear off fighting for justice beyond our borders for a generation? Was it Watergate, which ended common trust in leadership? (I watched “All the President’s Men” with my children recently, and to help them fully appreciate the suspense, I had to stop the disc and try to explain a time in which most people could not imagine the president of the United States would really do such a thing.)
    Was it the end of National Service, which gave rise to a generation that had never pulled together in common cause, and couldn’t even imagine doing so? Was it the “I got mine” hypergreed of the ’80s and ’90s, which made shared sacrifice passe?
    I don’t know. Maybe all of the above. I do know I’m tired of it. I miss the country I used to live in.
    That country would have stayed united for more than a few weeks after 9/11. It would have rolled up its sleeves and sacrificed to make itself economically independent of Mideast regimes that currently have no motivation to change the conditions that produce suicide bombers.
    But we don’t volunteer for that today, and “leaders” don’t dare suggest it.
    What got me started on all this? Lonnie Carter, president of Santee Cooper, said several things last week that sent my thoughts down these paths. He got me thinking how easy it would be for this nation to move toward energy independence, reduce greenhouse gases and even save money. It wouldn’t even be hard, or require sacrifice or inventiveness. We have the tools. It’s a matter of attitude.
    Mr. Carter showed us one of those curlicue fluorescent light bulbs. Big deal, I thought. I’ve got a few of those at home; my wife bought them. They look goofy, and don’t fit into some of our smaller fixtures.
    But Mr. Carter said that while such a bulb costs a couple of bucks more, it uses only 30 percent of the energy to produce the same light, and lasts 10 times as long. That one “60-watt” bulb (really only 15) would save you $53 before it gave out.
    Think how much energy we could save if all of us bought them. The things are already on the store shelves, but most of us bypass them for the old unreliables. It’s a “matter of changing our habits,” Mr. Carter said.
    How about renewable energy? Mr. Carter said utilities already offer that option to customers. But while 40 percent say they would pay a little more for such greener, smarter energy, only 1 percent actually do when it comes time to check that box on the bill.
    Attitude again.
    Then there’s nuclear power. “If our country is interested in energy independence and affecting climate change,” said Mr. Carter, “nuclear is the best option.” It’s clean, it’s efficient, and we don’t have to buy the fuel from lunatics.
    The government is even offering incentives to build the new generation of super-safe plants. But there’s still an attitude problem, as evidenced in the approval process. Santee Cooper plans to build two such plants. Just getting approval will take until 2010, so the plants can’t produce power before 2015. We managed to go from rockets that always blew up to “The Eagle has landed” in less time than that. And this time, we already have the technology.
    “We need all due diligence,” said Mr. Carter. “But we don’t need to drag our feet.”
    Still worried about spent fuel? “We know how to handle it safely,” he said. We’ve been doing so for 50 years. We also know how to put it away permanently; it’s “just a policy issue.”
If we could take such obvious steps, maybe we could then start taking the “tough” ones.
    Maybe we could even put the SUVs up on blocks and reduce our gasoline consumption to the point that Big Oil — and maybe even Washington — would see that they ought to invest some real effort in developing hydrogen, or biofuels, or whatever it takes.
    Did you know that Brazil expects to achieve energy independence this year? Maybe it has become the kind of country we used to be — the kind of country we could be again.
It just takes the right attitude.

‘Mary’ stands accused

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I’ve decided to set before this "community" an interesting proposition. Buried deep among the record 108 comments on my lengthy March 26 column is the following, from fellow Unpartian (I think) Paul DeMarco:

Thanks for trying to keep the debate civil. Personal attacks simply
demonstate that the attacker’s argument won’t stand on its own merit.
Mary’s "worthless piece of garbage" routine is tiresome and mitigates
any impact the substance of her message might have. If I were Brad, I
wouldn’t stand for it. I’d warn her and her like and then ban them from
the site if they continued. If not, I predict, the ugliness will only
worsen.

As you can see, the Unparty — assuming I’m right about Paul’s affiliation — is not for libertarians. We believe in the rule of law.

The thing is, the shifting community that has formed on this blog has no laws as yet. And we are still small enough that we have not formed a republic, therefore to the extent that we deliberate, we must do so through the "town-meeting" sort of direct democracy.

But now Citizen DeMarco has proposed not only a law, but presented its first test. He says that Mary Rosh‘s behavior is unacceptable in these virtual parts. He proposes a community standard, and a means of enforcement — a warning, followed if necessary by excommunication.

This is fascinating. We are present at the birth of a society, however rudimentary it may be. I’d like to see where the group will take this. I expect a wide variety of viewpoints to be expressed, but I’m curious to see whether we can nevertheless move toward a consensus — one way or the other, or in between somewhere.

Since I have a rather unique role in this society — you might say I’m sort of a unitary executive in a very liberal (in the classic sense) democracy — I’m not going to say what I think about Mary’s case at this point.

Anyway, we have the bill before us. Let’s debate it.

Another Iraq column

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Bush_honor_guard_1Support for U.S. Iraq effort and
support for Bush not the same
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
IT’S OK TO WANT the United States to succeed in Iraq, and still disapprove of President Bush. Really. It’s allowed.
    You don’t have to feel guilty if the president’s energy, tax and spending policies make you go “nookeelar,” but you understand that what matters in public policy is what you do with the situation you’re in — not the situation you would be in if you could rewrite history.
There’s nothing wrong with you.
    In fact, you owe it to your country to separate your feelings about Mr. Bush from your knowledge that failure in Iraq is not an option. It also helps if you have a clear grasp of the cold fact that he will be the president until 2009.
The single most important challenge, foreign or domestic, facing this country is to succeed in helping the Iraqi people build a free, safe and stable place to live. At the same time, the country needs another president — one just as committed to the mission, but with a clearer idea of how to accomplish it — to take over.
    But that can’t happen for almost three years. Given recent defeatist poll results, holding out that long is a tall order. But opinion that shifts one way can shift the other. That’s why every word I write about Iraq is aimed at persuading anyone I can reach that we must remain committed.
That’s what I tried to do in that super-long column we ran Sunday — to summarize all the reasons why, and how they connect.
    The response was mostly encouraging. Blog respondents who slap me around on a regular basis said complimentary things — even some who disagree.
    “Brad, this is a very thoughtful and well-organized argument for your viewpoint on Iraq,” wrote Phillip. “Of course, as you know, I disagree with most of it, but won’t rehash all of that here, just wanted to give you props for the good column.” Thanks, Phillip.
    Of course, we still had “Mary Rosh” out there to say, “Once again Warthen proves what a lazy, cowardly, hypocritical piece of garbage he is.” Mary’s not reachable.
    What worried me more was LeRoy, whom I seem to have reached, and yet not: “Sorry Brad but your sentiments are misplaced. True we are now in Iraq and unfortunately stuck there for several decades…. However to stay there with the same team that ‘had the best intentions in the world’ is misplaced loyalty.”
    How can he agree that we can’t leave, but interpret such commitment as support for the “team” that led us there? And what does he propose as an alternative to riding out the next three years with this team?
    “BLSAiken” wrote: “The President as much as admitted the other day that it will take another president to close out the mess he’s made. Brad makes some substantively good points, but it’s moot until the present band of nincompoops, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc., are out of office.”
    I’m anxious for another crew to take over, too. I don’t think those guys (and I’ll get to Ms. Rice in a moment) are “nincompoops,” but I think they have made far too many mistakes after the invasion. And Mr. Rumsfeld should have been replaced long ago. I made that clear in my Sunday column.
    But I didn’t go on and on about it.
Why? There’s no point. In late 2003, I begged for a candidate
to step forward and offer a credible alternative to the incumbent. I wrote out a long litany of what was wrong with the president.
But that was then, when there was a chance to replace him. That chance is gone.
    Bush-haters have fantasies of impeachment, or censure. This is idiotic. If he were impeached, Dick Cheney would be his replacement. (No, Virginia, they wouldn’t go out together.) And you couldn’t impeach both before their terms end. All you would accomplish is to weaken the United States in a time of war. Ditto with censure.
    We are already badly weakened. War/Bush opponents may have succeeded in infecting a majority with despair and defeatism, despite the relative success on the ground in Iraq. Even the Bush administration occasionally exhibits this battle-weariness; it was disturbing to hear Ms. Rice saying we might draw down in the near future.
    All of this plays into the hands of those who mean us nothing but ill — and want nothing but oppression for the Mideast.
    A Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday described the thinking of a leading foreign policy strategist in Iran’s radical Islamist government:

    “To hear (Hassan) Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of ‘the last helicopter.’ It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert…. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the bodies of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep…. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein’s generals, who could not believe… they had been allowed (to) live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton’s helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu….

    “According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an ‘aberration,’ a leader out of sync with his nation’s character and no more than a brief nightmare…”

    Mr. Abbasi is anxiously waiting for that “last helicopter” to leave Iraq, so that he and his ilk can fill the vacuum. I’m hoping and praying Mr. Bush will keep sticking it out, and that his successor will exhibit equal resolve, but greater effectiveness.
    This nation’s great tragedy is that far too many Americans agree so strongly with Mr. Abbasi that the president is a “nightmare” that they, too, long to see that “last helicopter” take off, because they badly want to see Mr. Bush fail.
    Hate the president if you insist. I wouldn’t recommend it — since he’s the only president we’ve got, you’re much more likely to influence policy by constituting a rational, loyal opposition than by foaming at the mouth. But that’s between you and him.
    I beg you, though: However you feel about the president, please love your country enough to support its crucial mission in Iraq. For all the reasons I wrote about Sunday, there simply is no good alternative. Don’t just “support the troops”; that’s a cop-out. Support what they’re doing, the goals they give their blood, sweat and tears for. They deserve that much. So do the rest of us.

Chicks dig guys with benefits

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… and, I might add to that headline, vice versa.

As if we needed more proof that our nation’s health care "system" is about as FUBAR as it can get, we learn that it is now playing a major role in our mating rituals.

The WSJ reported today that there’s a hot new trend in online dating: citing a preference for mates with employer-provided health insurance. Here’s the top of the story:

Christine Ferris is searching online for that special
someone. "I would like to meet a man who can relax and enjoy the woods,
the fog, the sea, the mountains," says her profile on dating site True.com. "Someone who can feel the wonder of nature. I am a romantic and you are too."

Also, her ideal man should "have health insurance and use it."

Hey, and it’s not just women. A Castle Rock, Colo., man named Dan Schmedeman has his own business; he’s an independent home builder. And that’s the problem: His insurance costs too much. So his ideal gal fits this description:

"I’m looking for a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to
ask for it…. One
with a nice smile and a healthy attitude, that can be open and
honest….A flat stomach and health insurance plan wouldn’t hurt
either."

Is this twisted or what? We’re the biggest, richest country in the world, and we’re the only advanced nation in which people are so desperate for medical security that they consider people who have it a turn-on.

We have got to get a handle on this, people.

Oh, and meanwhile, that same Journal front page had this story about how hospitals have started building only private rooms. It seems they finally figured out that patients got sicker having to room with some Typhoid Mary who loves to watch "Cops" at full volume 24 hours a day. So in this more pampered future, whose insurance — among that diminishing group that has insurance — going to pay for it? The story says that when there’s nothing out there but private rooms, they’ll have to pay. We’ll see, I suppose.

Mau-Mauing the Flak-Throwers

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My post earlier today linking to something in The Wall Street Journal reminded me of another piece that I never shared with you. It was in that paper (and yes, I do read other things) a week ago today: An interview with one of my all-time favorites, Tom Wolfe.

Have you ever wondered about the politics of the man who wrote Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flaked, Streamline Baby, The Right Stuff, and other brilliant, thoroughly enjoyable works of journalism/social criticism before he turned into a somewhat-painful-to-read novelist? Well, if you read The Guardian, you wouldn’t wonder.

That’s all right; I don’t read The Guardian, either. But thanks to what he’s written in the past, there were no surprises for me in this passage from the WSJ:

Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of
"what a fashion liberalism is." A reporter for the New York Times
called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of
the "Charlotte Simmons" book. "I just assumed it was the dazzling
quality of the writing," he says. In the course of the reporting,
however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. "The
reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was
as if I had raised my hand and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell
you, I’m a child molester.’" For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing
an American flag pin, "and it was as if I was holding up a cross to
werewolves."

George Bush’s appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his
"great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business
of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would
say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other
Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say —
‘Fools like you!’ . . . But then they catch themselves,
‘Wait a minute, I can’t go around saying that the majority of the
American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.’ So they just kind
of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this
kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don’t go
across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United
States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states.
They’re usually called blue states — they’re not blue states, the
states on the coast. They’re parenthesis states — the entire country
lies in between."

The wonderful thing about this is the way Wolfe catches modern "liberals" out in their own lack of self-awareness so neatly: He sneaks up on them. Just, as Wolfe chronicled, Ken Kesey took the steam out of an anti-war rally with a harmonica and a couple of verses of "Home on the Range," the King of Coolwrite sneaks up on liberals by being an artist and intellectual. They think they are among their own, and then "… UHHH … Ohmigod! YOU voted for BUSH?" Once his prey is paralyzed, he slices and dices it. He makes jullienne fries out of ’em.

I’d love to see him do the same to modern "conservatives," but dressed the way he is, they’re liable to spook before he gets close enough.

What do I have against both of these groups? They quit thinking. They bought their values off the shelf years ago as a complete set; they’re completely unprepared for anything that doesn’t fit in their little boxes. The Wolfe scene above reminds me of a passage in Bridget Jones’s Diary (yeah, I read it; I wanted to know what the women in my family were going on about). I mean the bit in which Bridget has already fallen for Mark Darcy, and they’ve gotten together and are dating (actually, maybe this happened in the second book), and she finds out quite inadvertently that he votes Tory. She is aghast: How could he? When he asks what’s wrong with being a Tory, she is unable to come up with a coherent answer. Why? Because she hasn’t really thought about it, ever. It’s just that everyone she knows takes it as gospel that all decent, caring people vote Labour. What is this? Mark’s a human rights lawyer, for goodness’ sake…

Between Bridget and Wolfe, I prefer Wolfe, who by contrast told The Guardian:

"I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world.
They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There
is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not
one of them."

There’s a character flaw in there somewhere (one that I’m afraid comes out in his novels), but he’s so refreshing, I’m willing to overlook it.