BY Katie Hafner
They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
“That’s one every few minutes,” he said. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”
The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.
“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”
Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”
As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.
“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”
Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm.
“Texting can be an enormous tool,” he said. “It offers companionship and the promise of connectedness. At the same time, texting can make a youngster feel frightened and overly exposed.”
Texting may also be taking a toll on teenagers’ thumbs. Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honor student in Bethesda, Md., used to text on her tiny LG phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard. A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs. (Lately, she has been using the iPhone she got for her 15th birthday, and she says texting is slower and less painful.)
Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said it was too early to tell whether this kind of stress is damaging. But he added,
“Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorders, so we have some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs.”
Annie said that although her school, like most, forbids cellphone use in class, with the LG phone she could text by putting it under her coat or desk.
Her classmate Ari Kapner said, “You pretend you’re getting something out of your backpack.”
Teachers are often oblivious. “It’s a huge issue, and it’s rampant,” said Deborah Yager, a high school chemistry teacher in Castro Valley, Calif. Ms. Yager recently gave an anonymous survey to 50 of her students; most said they texted during class.
“I can’t tell when it’s happening, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said. “And I’m not going to take the time every day to try to police it.”
Dr. Joffe says parents tend to be far less aware of texting than of, say, video game playing or general computer use, and the unlimited plans often mean that parents stop paying attention to billing details. “I talk to parents in the office now,” he said. “I’m quizzing them, and no one is thinking about this.”
Still, some parents are starting to take measures. Greg Hardesty, a reporter in Lake Forest, Calif., said that late last year his 13-year-old daughter, Reina, racked up 14,528 texts in one month. She would keep the phone on after going to bed, switching it to vibrate and waiting for it to light up and signal an incoming message.
Mr. Hardesty wrote a column about Reina’s texting in his newspaper, The Orange County Register, and in the flurry of attention that followed, her volume soared to about 24,000 messages. Finally, when her grades fell precipitously, her parents confiscated the phone.
Reina’s grades have since improved, and the phone is back in her hands, but her text messages are limited to 5,000 per month — and none between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on weekdays.
Yet she said there was an element of hypocrisy in all this: her mother, too, is hooked on the cellphone she carries in her purse.
“She should understand a little better, because she’s always on her iPhone,” Reina said. “But she’s all like, ‘Oh well, I don’t want you texting.’ ” (Her mother, Manako Ihaya, said she saw Reina’s point.) Professor Turkle can sympathize. “Teens feel they are being punished for behavior in which their parents indulge,” she said. And in what she calls a poignant twist, teenagers still need their parents’ undivided attention.
“Even though they text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” she said. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.”
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Ron Rash - Serena
Yes, it's a compelling novel, full of themes, and I enjoyed it very much. Rash is a great Southern writer, the equal of anyone.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Nutso Conservatives (from Paul Krugman)
The thing that is really driving conservatives crazy, I think, is that their identity politics just isn’t working like it used to. Their whole approach has been based on the belief that Americans vote as if they live in Mayberry, and fear and hate anyone who looks a bit different; now that the country just isn’t like that, they’ve gone mad.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Who is Bob Dylan Today?
May 24 – Bob Dylan Turns 68
DYLAN: THE HISTORY
I’ve been a Dylan fan since 1965, I can still remember hearing “Positively Fourth Street” on the radio---the first time I heard his voice. It was different. No chorus. It just went on and on. I loved it. From the first time I heard Dylan I was hooked. (When I was down, you just stood there grinnin’)
DYLAN: THE SYMBOL
As much as anybody, Bob Dylan symbolized the 60’s. I am a child of the 60’s pure and simple. Everything I think, everything I do, everything I AM, derives ultimately from that decade. Anything about me that you can think of can be traced to the 60’s. My life is a series of footnotes to the glorious 60’s. (The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind; the answer is blowing in the wind)
DYLAN: THE LYRICS
In the 60’s we debated the lyrics. We youngsters felt that Dylan knew things that we did not know, and that we could search for hidden meanings in his song lyrics to discover what he knew. Eventually we realized that Dylan didn’t know anything that we didn’t know or could discover on our own. We were not disillusioned about this. It’s just a sign of our hard-won maturity. (We were so much older then; we’re younger than that now)
BUT WHO IS BOB DYLAN TODAY?
At 68 he is my role model. The man continues to work, continues to write new music, continues to rework his old music---HE KEEPS MOVING FORWARD. This is his legacy today. Beyond the music, beyond the words, beyond the symbol, beyond the memories, he (as Randy Jackson might say) is working it out. Keep moving forward, keep working it out: this is who Bob Dylan is today. (It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there)
P.S. Dylan adorns the cover of the May 14th issue of Rolling Stone. I tried to grow the facial hair to imitate (mustache and tuff of hair below the lower lip), but I can’t seem to do facial hair in an attractive manner. My wife laughed at me as she saw it develop. My haircutter suggested a product called Just for Men to darken the facial hair, but my wife laughed even louder. I gave up. BUT IF I COULD, I’d be walking around today trying to look like Dylan.
DYLAN: THE HISTORY
I’ve been a Dylan fan since 1965, I can still remember hearing “Positively Fourth Street” on the radio---the first time I heard his voice. It was different. No chorus. It just went on and on. I loved it. From the first time I heard Dylan I was hooked. (When I was down, you just stood there grinnin’)
DYLAN: THE SYMBOL
As much as anybody, Bob Dylan symbolized the 60’s. I am a child of the 60’s pure and simple. Everything I think, everything I do, everything I AM, derives ultimately from that decade. Anything about me that you can think of can be traced to the 60’s. My life is a series of footnotes to the glorious 60’s. (The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind; the answer is blowing in the wind)
DYLAN: THE LYRICS
In the 60’s we debated the lyrics. We youngsters felt that Dylan knew things that we did not know, and that we could search for hidden meanings in his song lyrics to discover what he knew. Eventually we realized that Dylan didn’t know anything that we didn’t know or could discover on our own. We were not disillusioned about this. It’s just a sign of our hard-won maturity. (We were so much older then; we’re younger than that now)
BUT WHO IS BOB DYLAN TODAY?
At 68 he is my role model. The man continues to work, continues to write new music, continues to rework his old music---HE KEEPS MOVING FORWARD. This is his legacy today. Beyond the music, beyond the words, beyond the symbol, beyond the memories, he (as Randy Jackson might say) is working it out. Keep moving forward, keep working it out: this is who Bob Dylan is today. (It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there)
P.S. Dylan adorns the cover of the May 14th issue of Rolling Stone. I tried to grow the facial hair to imitate (mustache and tuff of hair below the lower lip), but I can’t seem to do facial hair in an attractive manner. My wife laughed at me as she saw it develop. My haircutter suggested a product called Just for Men to darken the facial hair, but my wife laughed even louder. I gave up. BUT IF I COULD, I’d be walking around today trying to look like Dylan.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Ron Rash - One Foot in Eden
After Freddy's review of "Serena," I went looking for Ron Rash. Before finding "Serena" at the Alabama Booksmith, I bought and now have read "One Foot in Eden."
I can say for real that Ron Rash is the real deal. He is the next great Southern writer. He writes of the Carolinas, his South, but it's so similiar to my South, Alabama.
I will not regurgitate the plot except to say that it revolves around the murder of a man named Holland Winchester. The implications of this event against the backdrop of a changing landscape and way of life for country folks (the power company is clearing their land) work their way to inevitable conclusions.
I wish that certain people did not have to die at the end, but this is the prerogerative of the author. I like Rash's writing because it's taut and directed without undue embellishment. In other words, I like his laconic style.
Now I've started "Serena." It's early, but I can say that this book is chilling.
I can say for real that Ron Rash is the real deal. He is the next great Southern writer. He writes of the Carolinas, his South, but it's so similiar to my South, Alabama.
I will not regurgitate the plot except to say that it revolves around the murder of a man named Holland Winchester. The implications of this event against the backdrop of a changing landscape and way of life for country folks (the power company is clearing their land) work their way to inevitable conclusions.
I wish that certain people did not have to die at the end, but this is the prerogerative of the author. I like Rash's writing because it's taut and directed without undue embellishment. In other words, I like his laconic style.
Now I've started "Serena." It's early, but I can say that this book is chilling.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Your Brain on Google
By Ezra Klein
19 May 2009
Washington Post
I liked these musings from Peter Suderman:
Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.
In other words, books taught us to think like they do — as tools for storing extensive knowledge. Now the web teaches us to think like it does — as a tool for recall and connection. We won’t be so good at memorizing everything there is to know about a particular small-bore topic, but we’ll be a lot better at knowing what there is to be known about the broader category the topic fits into, and what other information might provide insight and context.
You can, of course, overstate the novelty of this. People forget most of what they read in a book. (One editor I know complained about forgetting what he'd written in previous books.) I mark up my books ferociously. The hope is that my brain is a good enough index to remember which books are useful and where I'd marked the important passages.
In that way, I wonder whether our brains aren't becoming less like indexes and more like librarians. The situation isn't quite as Peter presents it: The key skill isn't knowing where to find information. It's knowing where to find where to find information. It's understanding connector terms and knowing the relative specialties of different search engines and finding the best aggregators and possessing ninja-level skills with Nexis. We don't need to learn to think like Google. We need to learn how to help Google think.
19 May 2009
Washington Post
I liked these musings from Peter Suderman:
Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.
In other words, books taught us to think like they do — as tools for storing extensive knowledge. Now the web teaches us to think like it does — as a tool for recall and connection. We won’t be so good at memorizing everything there is to know about a particular small-bore topic, but we’ll be a lot better at knowing what there is to be known about the broader category the topic fits into, and what other information might provide insight and context.
You can, of course, overstate the novelty of this. People forget most of what they read in a book. (One editor I know complained about forgetting what he'd written in previous books.) I mark up my books ferociously. The hope is that my brain is a good enough index to remember which books are useful and where I'd marked the important passages.
In that way, I wonder whether our brains aren't becoming less like indexes and more like librarians. The situation isn't quite as Peter presents it: The key skill isn't knowing where to find information. It's knowing where to find where to find information. It's understanding connector terms and knowing the relative specialties of different search engines and finding the best aggregators and possessing ninja-level skills with Nexis. We don't need to learn to think like Google. We need to learn how to help Google think.
The Decline of the GOP
The decline and fall of the Republican Party in recent years has been so widespread that the party has lost support among nearly every major demographic subgroup of likely voters across the country, according to a new Gallup poll.
The party lost support among a broad swath of Americans, from conservative to liberal, low-income to high-income, married to unmarried, and elderly to young.
The only subgroup in which the party saw a slight increase in support from 2001 to 2009 was frequent churchgoers.
The biggest declines, of roughly 10 percent, occurred among the college-educated, 18 to 29-year-olds, and Midwestern voters.
The turning point was 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, when the party's support really started to free-fall, according to Gallup: "By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades."
The party lost support among a broad swath of Americans, from conservative to liberal, low-income to high-income, married to unmarried, and elderly to young.
The only subgroup in which the party saw a slight increase in support from 2001 to 2009 was frequent churchgoers.
The biggest declines, of roughly 10 percent, occurred among the college-educated, 18 to 29-year-olds, and Midwestern voters.
The turning point was 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, when the party's support really started to free-fall, according to Gallup: "By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades."
Monday, May 18, 2009
Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush
BY Frank Rich
16 May 2009
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
The GQ article isn’t the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.
What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”
When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction.
But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges. The inspector general’s office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.
Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general’s office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?
In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn’t buy the heavily redacted report’s claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.
But the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!
The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
16 May 2009
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
The GQ article isn’t the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.
What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”
When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction.
But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges. The inspector general’s office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.
Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general’s office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?
In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn’t buy the heavily redacted report’s claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.
But the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!
The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Republican Comedy Act
Arianna Huffington: Sunday Roundup
Next week, Adam and Kris duke it out to see who will be the next American Idol. This week, Republicans duked it out to see who would be the next American Idiot. Sen. Jeff Sessions argued for keeping Guantanamo open by pointing to the "tropical breezes blowing through" the prison. Rep. Pete Sessions claimed President Obama is intentionally driving up unemployment and diminishing stock prices to "inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system." And Kim Hendren, a Republican Senate candidate from Arkansas, referred to Chuck Schumer at a campaign event as "that Jew," then dug himself deeper: "I was attempting to explain that unlike Sen. Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on The Andy Griffith Show." I guessed he missed the episode about Goober's bar mitzvah. The Grand Oy Party.
Next week, Adam and Kris duke it out to see who will be the next American Idol. This week, Republicans duked it out to see who would be the next American Idiot. Sen. Jeff Sessions argued for keeping Guantanamo open by pointing to the "tropical breezes blowing through" the prison. Rep. Pete Sessions claimed President Obama is intentionally driving up unemployment and diminishing stock prices to "inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system." And Kim Hendren, a Republican Senate candidate from Arkansas, referred to Chuck Schumer at a campaign event as "that Jew," then dug himself deeper: "I was attempting to explain that unlike Sen. Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on The Andy Griffith Show." I guessed he missed the episode about Goober's bar mitzvah. The Grand Oy Party.
The Steven Johnson Article
If ideas and innovation bloom in the digital world, I will believe it when I see it.
Reading remains for me a private activity and I believe that for most serious readers it will remain essentially private also despite the opportunity to share online.
That we will stumble upon books that we did not know about through links is certainly true and has already been true for me.
More public commenting on books excerpts? Again, I'll believe when I see it. I am dubious.
I hope that digitizing does NOT lead to the way books are written.
Reading remains for me a private activity and I believe that for most serious readers it will remain essentially private also despite the opportunity to share online.
That we will stumble upon books that we did not know about through links is certainly true and has already been true for me.
More public commenting on books excerpts? Again, I'll believe when I see it. I am dubious.
I hope that digitizing does NOT lead to the way books are written.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
The following article by author Steven Johnson appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. It discusses the effects of technology on reading and the future of the book, seeing both positives and negatives. Because of the article's length, I posted some of the main points below, in addition to the link to the article.
- "Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà ! -- you own it."
- "Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg."
- "Think of it as a permanent, global book club... Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world."
- "This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too... readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper."
- "A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors."
- "With books becoming part of this universe, 'booklogs' will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public."
Friday, May 15, 2009
Serena by Ron Rash
A terrific book! Better than most books I have read in a long while.
It centers on Serena and George Pemberton, who own a lumber company that is logging land in North Carolina in 1929. George begins this venture alone, but soon fathers a child with sixteen year old Rachel Harmon, a kitchen worker in the camp. He then goes to Boston, where he meets Serena and brings her back as his wife and business partner.
The book begins with a quick jolt, as the first paragraph depicts Serena and George stepping off the train from Boston, with Rachel's father waiting to stick a knife in George's heart. George kills him, and thus sets off the brutal events to follow.
Serena proves herself astute and powerful, to the point of myth among the camp's workers. She quickly assumes responsibility for the company's operations, aspiring to eventually leave North Carolina and begin logging in Brazil. She commands absolute loyalty and wants the lumber company to be hers and George's alone. Serena kills, pays off, or pushes out anyone who gets in her way or inconveniences her.
Eventually, this means killing Rachel and her son Jacob. George, however, feels a connection to his child, and when Serena suspects him of helping them escape, her viciousness comes to fruition.
Set against the backdrop of the Depression, the book is not only about survivial and the growing tension between Serena and George, but also the utter ruthlessness of Serena. Her unabashed greed contrasts with the workers doing the logging, a colorful cast that Rash seamlessly interweaves into the story. They are poor and need the work to live, whereas the Pemberons live in opulence. In addition, the book also serves as an ode to environmentalism and a warning against consequences of nature's destruction. It shows that living in the now without planning for the future is unwise at best.
The book is written beautifully and with simple clarity. It combines the brutality and lawlessness of Cormac McCarthy with the down-home yarns and rustic splendor of William Faulkner.
I had never heard of this author or this book, but, gratefully, Ben lent this book to me. He got it as a member of the Signed First Editions Club of the Alabama Booksmith.
Indeed, Rash is not terribly well-known, as the New York Times review of the book indicates that the "fine-tuned voice of this Appalachian poet and storyteller... has been largely regional despite an O. Henry Prize and other honors." The review goes on to describe the book as "With bone-chilling aplomb, linguistic grace and the piercing fatalism of an Appalachian ballad."
A definite recommendation!
It centers on Serena and George Pemberton, who own a lumber company that is logging land in North Carolina in 1929. George begins this venture alone, but soon fathers a child with sixteen year old Rachel Harmon, a kitchen worker in the camp. He then goes to Boston, where he meets Serena and brings her back as his wife and business partner.
The book begins with a quick jolt, as the first paragraph depicts Serena and George stepping off the train from Boston, with Rachel's father waiting to stick a knife in George's heart. George kills him, and thus sets off the brutal events to follow.
Serena proves herself astute and powerful, to the point of myth among the camp's workers. She quickly assumes responsibility for the company's operations, aspiring to eventually leave North Carolina and begin logging in Brazil. She commands absolute loyalty and wants the lumber company to be hers and George's alone. Serena kills, pays off, or pushes out anyone who gets in her way or inconveniences her.
Eventually, this means killing Rachel and her son Jacob. George, however, feels a connection to his child, and when Serena suspects him of helping them escape, her viciousness comes to fruition.
Set against the backdrop of the Depression, the book is not only about survivial and the growing tension between Serena and George, but also the utter ruthlessness of Serena. Her unabashed greed contrasts with the workers doing the logging, a colorful cast that Rash seamlessly interweaves into the story. They are poor and need the work to live, whereas the Pemberons live in opulence. In addition, the book also serves as an ode to environmentalism and a warning against consequences of nature's destruction. It shows that living in the now without planning for the future is unwise at best.
The book is written beautifully and with simple clarity. It combines the brutality and lawlessness of Cormac McCarthy with the down-home yarns and rustic splendor of William Faulkner.
I had never heard of this author or this book, but, gratefully, Ben lent this book to me. He got it as a member of the Signed First Editions Club of the Alabama Booksmith.
Indeed, Rash is not terribly well-known, as the New York Times review of the book indicates that the "fine-tuned voice of this Appalachian poet and storyteller... has been largely regional despite an O. Henry Prize and other honors." The review goes on to describe the book as "With bone-chilling aplomb, linguistic grace and the piercing fatalism of an Appalachian ballad."
A definite recommendation!
Some Memorable Books
My cousin Faye Alexander, who passed away last December, was an avid reader. I have never seen her collection, which is now the property of my second cousin Linda Hester, who lives in Pensacola, but I understand it is quite robust. The first Sunday in May Linda presented me with four books from Faye's collection. I will always treasure them. What better momento than books from someone's library!
Thursday, May 14, 2009
What Andrew Sullivan Says
Andrew Sullivan has become my favorite blogger. Even though he is a conservative, he is a conversative in the right way---not one of the mindless movement (strictly political) conservatives. Though conservative, he is deeply embarassed by the current Republican Party as any thinking person should be.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
14 May 2009 08:29 am
Wanted: Conservative Intellectuals
Nate Silver wonders about the party intelligence gap:
Republicans have gradually been losing the egghead vote. I wonder how that translates into their ability to recruit strategists and "thought-leaders" who can work on the campaign, policy and media sides and help to lead them out of their current slump.
I think it's real. It's never been that easy being an intellectual on the right. I spent most of my college and grad school years in mortal combat. But the degeneracy of the Republican party today makes every thinking person I know wince. It doesn't debunk conservative ideas about the failures of government solutions, the wisdom of markets, the necessity for sound money and balanced budgets, or the need for prudence in foreign policy. But the association with these debt-ridden, torture-loving, big government authoritarians is awful. And people are only human. What serious thinker wants to support the party of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
14 May 2009 08:29 am
Wanted: Conservative Intellectuals
Nate Silver wonders about the party intelligence gap:
Republicans have gradually been losing the egghead vote. I wonder how that translates into their ability to recruit strategists and "thought-leaders" who can work on the campaign, policy and media sides and help to lead them out of their current slump.
I think it's real. It's never been that easy being an intellectual on the right. I spent most of my college and grad school years in mortal combat. But the degeneracy of the Republican party today makes every thinking person I know wince. It doesn't debunk conservative ideas about the failures of government solutions, the wisdom of markets, the necessity for sound money and balanced budgets, or the need for prudence in foreign policy. But the association with these debt-ridden, torture-loving, big government authoritarians is awful. And people are only human. What serious thinker wants to support the party of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.
The Idiocy of Jeff Sessions
The idiocy of Republicans like our own Sen. Jeff Sessions is truly mind-boggling. How on earth do we elect idiots like this?
Citing 'Tropical Breezes,' Sessions Defends Keeping Guantanamo Open
By Paul Kane Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) today defended the continued detention of al-Qaeda prisoners at the military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, calling it a "logical" site that also provides inmates with "tropical breezes."
Citing 'Tropical Breezes,' Sessions Defends Keeping Guantanamo Open
By Paul Kane Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) today defended the continued detention of al-Qaeda prisoners at the military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, calling it a "logical" site that also provides inmates with "tropical breezes."
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
As if There's Ever Been Any Doubt
As if there's ever been any doubt about the racism of Rush Limbaugh, the head of the Republican Party, or the racism that is the core of the Republican Party, consider one of Rush's latest pronouncements from Andrew Sullivan.
Hewitt Award Nominee
"This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, “rightful owners.” Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on," - Rush Limbaugh, leader of the GOP.
Forced reparations from the first black president. Well, I guess no one ever accused Limbaugh of keeping his racism under wraps
Hewitt Award Nominee
"This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, “rightful owners.” Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on," - Rush Limbaugh, leader of the GOP.
Forced reparations from the first black president. Well, I guess no one ever accused Limbaugh of keeping his racism under wraps
Back to the 13th Century?
From Andrew Sullivan------11 May 2009 06:45 pm
"Like Something Out Of The Thirteenth Century"
Those were Bob Woodward's words to describe the Bush-Cheney torture techniques. I feel the Beltway finally shifting ... realizing the gravity of what took place, and the consequences that stretch long into the future. I wonder if Bush's silence suggests he too is beginning to grasp what he did to America; and how indelible it is.
It is obvious that Cheney is betting on the US being attacked again and by defending torture, he expects the electorate to blame the Democrats ending illegal torture for the attack and thereby vote Republicans back into office. There is no more despicable human being on the planet than Dick Cheney.
"Like Something Out Of The Thirteenth Century"
Those were Bob Woodward's words to describe the Bush-Cheney torture techniques. I feel the Beltway finally shifting ... realizing the gravity of what took place, and the consequences that stretch long into the future. I wonder if Bush's silence suggests he too is beginning to grasp what he did to America; and how indelible it is.
It is obvious that Cheney is betting on the US being attacked again and by defending torture, he expects the electorate to blame the Democrats ending illegal torture for the attack and thereby vote Republicans back into office. There is no more despicable human being on the planet than Dick Cheney.
Obama's Rope-A-Dope?
Blogger Andrew Sullivan says Obama is adept at a rope-a-dope strategy. He says let's move on rather than dredge up torture accusations but then releases info that clearly shows that the US tortured. Cheney walks right into the trap. It's as if Obama gives his opponents a little rope and they proceed to hang themselves.
11 May 2009 06:49 pm
The Rope-A-Dope Again
So Obama plays defense on torture, urging that we move forward, while releasing crucial information and letting others use up the vacuum. Cheney blunders in ... and even Lieberman has to take up arms against him. This is how this president operates. After Clinton and McCain, Cheney is the latest victim. And by demanding more and more transparency, the former vice-president slowly exposes ... himself.
11 May 2009 06:49 pm
The Rope-A-Dope Again
So Obama plays defense on torture, urging that we move forward, while releasing crucial information and letting others use up the vacuum. Cheney blunders in ... and even Lieberman has to take up arms against him. This is how this president operates. After Clinton and McCain, Cheney is the latest victim. And by demanding more and more transparency, the former vice-president slowly exposes ... himself.
David Grann---The Lost City of Z
This is quite a story. Going back to the 16th century there were stories and rumors and speculations about an advanced civilization in the Brazilian Amazon. Many an explorer tried to find its remains including a British man named Fawcett in the 20th century. Fawcett was obsessed with trying find the so-called Lost City of Z.
The story ended in tragedy as most such stories do, but along the way in this book we read about this obsessed man, the British society and times he came from, and we read about the amazing Amazon River, the largest river in the world. At its zenith this river is 200 miles wide---incredible!
As a thrilling story about a different time and a different place and an obsession, this book is terrific.
The story ended in tragedy as most such stories do, but along the way in this book we read about this obsessed man, the British society and times he came from, and we read about the amazing Amazon River, the largest river in the world. At its zenith this river is 200 miles wide---incredible!
As a thrilling story about a different time and a different place and an obsession, this book is terrific.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Indulgence
About once a month I stop by my local Starbucks on Jack Hawkins Parkway for my one and only indulgence in life. There I have a caramel frap (as the employees say), a plain heated bagel (You can choose between lightly warmed and medium warmed. I prefer the latter), AND I read the actual paper and ink New York Times. That’s because they sell it there. I make it a point to leave the paper there for the next person, doing my part to promote literacy in my town.
It’s an indulgence now to leisurely read a newspaper in the original paper form the way God meant for a newspaper to be read. Take your time, turn the pages, see things you would not see online. This is because you can easily go through a newspaper front to back whereas online you naturally skip around and you will likely miss something. I will flip through the Arts section in paper but seldom online. Except for the classifieds (I ain’t looking for a job in New York), I turn every page.
Then there’s the tactile pleasure of fondling paper, flipping pages back and forth, folding and unfolding, SMELLING the paper and print. The pleasure of print, even in this age of digital information, will never leave me.
The NY Times is STILL the newspaper of record. I read it online each day. Wouldn’t miss it. Once you get used to reading it online, you don’t take the time or the daily expense to read the real thing each day.
Talking about seeing things you might not see otherwise online: The last time I was Starbucking, reading the paper Times, I saw this article in the Arts section about a singer/songwriter stage named St. Vincent, real name Annie Clark. She named herself after the final destination of the poet Dylan Thomas. So far so good. But-----
She says in the article, “I like things that are unsettling or a little bit creepy."
In her latest album she says she’s tried to combine the purity of Disney with things that are bloody, gory, and disgusting. Oh, my.
The article prints this excerpt from one of her songs:
We’re sleeping underneath the bed
To scare the monsters out
With our dear daddy’s Smith & Wesson
We’ve got to teach them all a lesson.
There is a picture of her with the article. This 26-yr. old looks so sweet and demure. But then she writes lyrics like this. The article talks about her intensity and how she intimidates people. She IS creepy if you ask me. Maybe she’s talented. Maybe she’s harmless, but I wonder. As Tolstoy might put it, every creep is creepy in his own way.
It’s an indulgence now to leisurely read a newspaper in the original paper form the way God meant for a newspaper to be read. Take your time, turn the pages, see things you would not see online. This is because you can easily go through a newspaper front to back whereas online you naturally skip around and you will likely miss something. I will flip through the Arts section in paper but seldom online. Except for the classifieds (I ain’t looking for a job in New York), I turn every page.
Then there’s the tactile pleasure of fondling paper, flipping pages back and forth, folding and unfolding, SMELLING the paper and print. The pleasure of print, even in this age of digital information, will never leave me.
The NY Times is STILL the newspaper of record. I read it online each day. Wouldn’t miss it. Once you get used to reading it online, you don’t take the time or the daily expense to read the real thing each day.
Talking about seeing things you might not see otherwise online: The last time I was Starbucking, reading the paper Times, I saw this article in the Arts section about a singer/songwriter stage named St. Vincent, real name Annie Clark. She named herself after the final destination of the poet Dylan Thomas. So far so good. But-----
She says in the article, “I like things that are unsettling or a little bit creepy."
In her latest album she says she’s tried to combine the purity of Disney with things that are bloody, gory, and disgusting. Oh, my.
The article prints this excerpt from one of her songs:
We’re sleeping underneath the bed
To scare the monsters out
With our dear daddy’s Smith & Wesson
We’ve got to teach them all a lesson.
There is a picture of her with the article. This 26-yr. old looks so sweet and demure. But then she writes lyrics like this. The article talks about her intensity and how she intimidates people. She IS creepy if you ask me. Maybe she’s talented. Maybe she’s harmless, but I wonder. As Tolstoy might put it, every creep is creepy in his own way.
Friday, May 8, 2009
The New York Review of Books & The Lost City of Z
How did I live so long without reading The New York Review of Books? This premier book review is THE book review for elite readers. Do I dare call myself an ELITE reader? Sure!
The current issue has a review of a book I am reading currently called The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I don't normally read adventure nonfiction like this, but I couldn't resist the story line in this one.
It seems that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, South America and in particular Brazil was the place to go for adventureous North Americans. Mark Twain considered a trip to South America, but he never made it.
What could draw interest to South America? Why, of course, a potential lost civilization!
The speculatation centered on a civilization and/or city that came to be called Z. This book is about an eccentric explorer named Fawcett who made many exploring trips to South Alabama, convinced that this lost civilization actually existed. Therein lies the tail. We shall see what happens.
So thanks again to Freddy for the Christmas present of the NY Review of Books. I will be reading it for the rest of my life.
The current issue has a review of a book I am reading currently called The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I don't normally read adventure nonfiction like this, but I couldn't resist the story line in this one.
It seems that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, South America and in particular Brazil was the place to go for adventureous North Americans. Mark Twain considered a trip to South America, but he never made it.
What could draw interest to South America? Why, of course, a potential lost civilization!
The speculatation centered on a civilization and/or city that came to be called Z. This book is about an eccentric explorer named Fawcett who made many exploring trips to South Alabama, convinced that this lost civilization actually existed. Therein lies the tail. We shall see what happens.
So thanks again to Freddy for the Christmas present of the NY Review of Books. I will be reading it for the rest of my life.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Feeling Smarter
My friend Ben is moving to a new apartment tomorrow. He is receiving his Ph.D. in English this Saturday, and he has so many books that he asked me to take some to ease his move. In fact, the three books I took are actually one novel divided into seven parts.
This set is now on my bookshelves, and I must admit that I feel my intellectual acumen has risen sharply as a consequence. The novel is Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. I think that merely having this novel somehow enhances my literary stature; it provides a boost as well to the other books on my bookshelves. I feel that I should go forth and proudly announce to all who will listen that I have the magnum opus of Marcel Proust.
All of you non-Proust owners out there should be jealous.
Now... if only I would read all 3,000 pages of Remembrance of Things Past! Hmmmm.
This set is now on my bookshelves, and I must admit that I feel my intellectual acumen has risen sharply as a consequence. The novel is Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. I think that merely having this novel somehow enhances my literary stature; it provides a boost as well to the other books on my bookshelves. I feel that I should go forth and proudly announce to all who will listen that I have the magnum opus of Marcel Proust.
All of you non-Proust owners out there should be jealous.
Now... if only I would read all 3,000 pages of Remembrance of Things Past! Hmmmm.
The Calcified Republican Party by Matt Steinglass
Every calcified party is calcified in its own way
May 6, 2009, 3:04 pm Filed under: Conservatism
In the whither-the-GOP conversation, it’s often remarked that today’s Republican Party has reached a state of ideological rigidity that traps it just as the Democratic Party was trapped in the late 1970s and 1980s. And that’s true. But then it’s also often said, as Ross Douthat did yesterday, that the GOP has become ideologically rigid in the same way that Democrats were a generation ago:
The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago.
But that’s actually not true. Liberalism was trapped in the late 1970s and 1980s not by a single ideologically rigid formula, but by a rigid commitment to a thousand different, often unrelated interest group platforms. These platforms were usually expressed in outraged moralistic terms drawn from a common liberal vocabulary even though they often had nothing to do with each other. The Democrats were pinned down like Gulliver by a million tiny commitments: the Teamsters, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, teachers, Jews, feminists, Amtrak, the Sierra Club, opponents of intervention in Nicaragua, the nuclear freeze movement, and on and on — all had their individual planks in the party platform, and all required a ritualistic demonstration of obeisance from every candidate. Democratic political speeches became long, tedious laundry lists of incoherent moralistic vows to deliver comically specific programs to micro-splinters of constituencies. I remember visiting colleges in 1986 and watching a Brown campus improv group, not very funny, do a sketch in which a young woman activist demanded that everyone join her campaign to help get penguins out of Nicaraguan grain elevators, and this seemed a fair lampoon of the tenor of the times on the Left. The Democrats and the Left suffered from a big-tent sort of calcification; they were immobilized by diversity.
In contrast, conservatives and the GOP are calcified in their narrowness. The only things left in their program are cutting taxes and…actually I think that’s it, with a bit of defending torture and fighting gay marriage thrown in. They’re losing everyone but white males, and they’re losing everywhere but the South. They’re trapped because anything they do to reach out threatens to lose them more of the one constituency they’re still winning. The problems are different, and in some senses opposite. The Democrats wrenched themselves out of immobility by publicly repudiating some of those rigid commitments — chiefly to poor blacks and to labor — to show that the party was able to compromise in order to move and win. It was a Sister Souljah strategy. But Republicans are looking at a different dynamic, and it’s not clear that pulling a Sister Souljah on Rush Limbaugh, say, is what they need. I’m not sure quite what they need, but it’s not really going to mirror what the Democrats did in the early ’90s to win.
May 6, 2009, 3:04 pm Filed under: Conservatism
In the whither-the-GOP conversation, it’s often remarked that today’s Republican Party has reached a state of ideological rigidity that traps it just as the Democratic Party was trapped in the late 1970s and 1980s. And that’s true. But then it’s also often said, as Ross Douthat did yesterday, that the GOP has become ideologically rigid in the same way that Democrats were a generation ago:
The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago.
But that’s actually not true. Liberalism was trapped in the late 1970s and 1980s not by a single ideologically rigid formula, but by a rigid commitment to a thousand different, often unrelated interest group platforms. These platforms were usually expressed in outraged moralistic terms drawn from a common liberal vocabulary even though they often had nothing to do with each other. The Democrats were pinned down like Gulliver by a million tiny commitments: the Teamsters, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, teachers, Jews, feminists, Amtrak, the Sierra Club, opponents of intervention in Nicaragua, the nuclear freeze movement, and on and on — all had their individual planks in the party platform, and all required a ritualistic demonstration of obeisance from every candidate. Democratic political speeches became long, tedious laundry lists of incoherent moralistic vows to deliver comically specific programs to micro-splinters of constituencies. I remember visiting colleges in 1986 and watching a Brown campus improv group, not very funny, do a sketch in which a young woman activist demanded that everyone join her campaign to help get penguins out of Nicaraguan grain elevators, and this seemed a fair lampoon of the tenor of the times on the Left. The Democrats and the Left suffered from a big-tent sort of calcification; they were immobilized by diversity.
In contrast, conservatives and the GOP are calcified in their narrowness. The only things left in their program are cutting taxes and…actually I think that’s it, with a bit of defending torture and fighting gay marriage thrown in. They’re losing everyone but white males, and they’re losing everywhere but the South. They’re trapped because anything they do to reach out threatens to lose them more of the one constituency they’re still winning. The problems are different, and in some senses opposite. The Democrats wrenched themselves out of immobility by publicly repudiating some of those rigid commitments — chiefly to poor blacks and to labor — to show that the party was able to compromise in order to move and win. It was a Sister Souljah strategy. But Republicans are looking at a different dynamic, and it’s not clear that pulling a Sister Souljah on Rush Limbaugh, say, is what they need. I’m not sure quite what they need, but it’s not really going to mirror what the Democrats did in the early ’90s to win.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
I greatly enjoyed this book. It might be the best book I have read thus far this year. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
The story starts with ten year old Kate Meaney, who with her creative imagination conducts surveillance on unsuspecting people when she is not in school. She takes notes on their behavior, intent on using her detective skills to stop crime. Most of her adventures are at the local mall, Green Oaks. Eventually, however, she disappears without explanation, and her best friend Adrian, twenty-two years old, is suspicioned as the culprit. He too disappears.
Twenty years later, Lisa is a manager at a music store at that mall. She is unhappy and lost. She does not like her job or her relationship with Ed. She once dreamed of a more fulfilling life, but has only been spiraling farther away from it. Some of the blame rests with her dismay over her brother Adrian's disappearance, believing that he was undoubtedly innocent.
Similarly, Kurt works as a security guard at the mall. He has always sought to please his overbearing father, but has never been able to. His relationship with Nancy ended when she died in a car accident. He too feels stuck and lost in his life, seemingly unable to do anything about it.
What brings these two out of their darkness is Kate Meaney, as both have a connection to her disappearance. Both, unable to believe in themselves, seek refuge and salvation in each other. Together, they help solve the mystery of Kate's disappearance.
The book is about being lost and being found and the power of others to inspire the best in us. With the mall as a backdrop to the story, the book is also about how as a culture our consumerism drives us to lose ourselves in a mass hysteria to buy buy buy. Putting these themes together, the book shows that to find yourself sometimes you have to look to the past and rely on personal relationships with others.
The story starts with ten year old Kate Meaney, who with her creative imagination conducts surveillance on unsuspecting people when she is not in school. She takes notes on their behavior, intent on using her detective skills to stop crime. Most of her adventures are at the local mall, Green Oaks. Eventually, however, she disappears without explanation, and her best friend Adrian, twenty-two years old, is suspicioned as the culprit. He too disappears.
Twenty years later, Lisa is a manager at a music store at that mall. She is unhappy and lost. She does not like her job or her relationship with Ed. She once dreamed of a more fulfilling life, but has only been spiraling farther away from it. Some of the blame rests with her dismay over her brother Adrian's disappearance, believing that he was undoubtedly innocent.
Similarly, Kurt works as a security guard at the mall. He has always sought to please his overbearing father, but has never been able to. His relationship with Nancy ended when she died in a car accident. He too feels stuck and lost in his life, seemingly unable to do anything about it.
What brings these two out of their darkness is Kate Meaney, as both have a connection to her disappearance. Both, unable to believe in themselves, seek refuge and salvation in each other. Together, they help solve the mystery of Kate's disappearance.
The book is about being lost and being found and the power of others to inspire the best in us. With the mall as a backdrop to the story, the book is also about how as a culture our consumerism drives us to lose ourselves in a mass hysteria to buy buy buy. Putting these themes together, the book shows that to find yourself sometimes you have to look to the past and rely on personal relationships with others.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Arlen Specter Says
We read this as the Republican Party pushes itself further and further into right-wing lunacy. The gun-totin', Obama-hating, torture-lovin', capital punishment pro-lifer Republican "conservatives" have no use for a pragmatist like Specter who puts the good of the country above ideological purity.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter said Sunday that he hopes his recent switch to the Democratic Party will serve as a "wake-up call" to an increasingly conservative GOP.
The GOP has declined in part because conservatives have targeted moderates, Sen. Arlen Specter says.
He also once again assigned some blame for the recent decline of the Republican Party to the political advocacy group Club for Growth, which targets moderate GOP incumbents who do not adhere to the doctrine of supply-side economics.
Club for Growth fought Specter's GOP renomination in 2004 and was set to oppose him again in the 2010 primary.
"It would be my hope ... that this would be a wake-up call and the [GOP] would move for a broader big tent like we had under Reagan," Specter said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
"The party has changed so much since I was elected in 1980," he said.
Specter argued the GOP suffered repeated setbacks across the more progressive Northeast and Midwest because groups like Club for Growth "defeated moderate Republicans in the primary, knowing that [the more conservative nominees] would lose in the general election, because purity is more important than Republicans in office."
The failure of conservatives to compromise, Specter said, translates to a number of Republican policy setbacks that could have been avoided.
He cited the example of former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a liberal Republican forced to spend significant time and money fending off a conservative primary challenger in 2006. Chafee went on to narrowly lose his state's general election to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.
Had Chafee "been elected to the Senate in 2006 ... there would have been Republican control [of the Senate] in 2007 and 2008," Specter said. Had that happened, as many as 34 additional Bush judicial nominees could have been confirmed, he said.
Specter, who switched parties Tuesday, said he was forced to make the move when his vote for President Obama's economic stimulus plan led to a collapse of his support within a shrunken, more conservative Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate.
On "one vote, the stimulus package vote, I was ostracized," he said. "I don't expect people to agree with all my votes. I don't agree with them all, at this point. But you've got to have some latitude."
Specter said during a separate appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" that national Democratic leaders offered him no incentives to switch parties
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter said Sunday that he hopes his recent switch to the Democratic Party will serve as a "wake-up call" to an increasingly conservative GOP.
The GOP has declined in part because conservatives have targeted moderates, Sen. Arlen Specter says.
He also once again assigned some blame for the recent decline of the Republican Party to the political advocacy group Club for Growth, which targets moderate GOP incumbents who do not adhere to the doctrine of supply-side economics.
Club for Growth fought Specter's GOP renomination in 2004 and was set to oppose him again in the 2010 primary.
"It would be my hope ... that this would be a wake-up call and the [GOP] would move for a broader big tent like we had under Reagan," Specter said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
"The party has changed so much since I was elected in 1980," he said.
Specter argued the GOP suffered repeated setbacks across the more progressive Northeast and Midwest because groups like Club for Growth "defeated moderate Republicans in the primary, knowing that [the more conservative nominees] would lose in the general election, because purity is more important than Republicans in office."
The failure of conservatives to compromise, Specter said, translates to a number of Republican policy setbacks that could have been avoided.
He cited the example of former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a liberal Republican forced to spend significant time and money fending off a conservative primary challenger in 2006. Chafee went on to narrowly lose his state's general election to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.
Had Chafee "been elected to the Senate in 2006 ... there would have been Republican control [of the Senate] in 2007 and 2008," Specter said. Had that happened, as many as 34 additional Bush judicial nominees could have been confirmed, he said.
Specter, who switched parties Tuesday, said he was forced to make the move when his vote for President Obama's economic stimulus plan led to a collapse of his support within a shrunken, more conservative Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate.
On "one vote, the stimulus package vote, I was ostracized," he said. "I don't expect people to agree with all my votes. I don't agree with them all, at this point. But you've got to have some latitude."
Specter said during a separate appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" that national Democratic leaders offered him no incentives to switch parties
Sunday, May 3, 2009
About Mark Twain (5)
After reading the Ron Powers biography of Mark Twain and the Justin Kaplan book, an abbreviation of his 1966 Pulitzer prize winner, I am finished with Twain for the moment. The Powers book is the best comprehensive look at Twain in recent years, and the Kaplan book, published in 1974, is the best short introduction to Twain.
My intent is to understand Twain within the context of the 19th century, for he was certainly one of the seminal figures of the latter half of that century. I read about his upbringing in Missouri and about his days as a steamboat captain. The coming of the railroads and the Civil War ended that career opportunity for Twain.
He served for all of a month in the service of the Confederacy before fleeing the war to Nevada and California. As much as anything, I enjoy reading about his Western days, in particular his time in San Francisco. I will never again walk along Montgomery St. in S.F. without thinking about Twain being there in the 1860's.
Twain figured he could not achieve literary fame without leaving the West and going East, which he did. He found favor with William Dean Howels, the dean of American Letters in the U.S. after the war, and he married into a prominent New York family, going from Buffalo to Elmira, and finally to Hartford, Connecticut, then a den of Eastern writers. Along the way, he superseded Bret Harte, one of his first intellectual benefactors. His model for his stage prescence---his career lecturing and performing from the stage---was Artimus Ward. Twain had his role models along the way.
He didn't strike it rich in the West---no gold or silver did he find hin his mining days out West during the war---but he eventually found financial success although he declared bankruptcy in 1895 after a foolish investment in a printing press that lost out in the marketplace. By the time he died, Twain had regained his financial footing.
Twain outlived his wife and three of his four kids. His last years were bitter because of his losses, but he kept his promise to live until Haley's Comet returned in 1910.
My intent is to understand Twain within the context of the 19th century, for he was certainly one of the seminal figures of the latter half of that century. I read about his upbringing in Missouri and about his days as a steamboat captain. The coming of the railroads and the Civil War ended that career opportunity for Twain.
He served for all of a month in the service of the Confederacy before fleeing the war to Nevada and California. As much as anything, I enjoy reading about his Western days, in particular his time in San Francisco. I will never again walk along Montgomery St. in S.F. without thinking about Twain being there in the 1860's.
Twain figured he could not achieve literary fame without leaving the West and going East, which he did. He found favor with William Dean Howels, the dean of American Letters in the U.S. after the war, and he married into a prominent New York family, going from Buffalo to Elmira, and finally to Hartford, Connecticut, then a den of Eastern writers. Along the way, he superseded Bret Harte, one of his first intellectual benefactors. His model for his stage prescence---his career lecturing and performing from the stage---was Artimus Ward. Twain had his role models along the way.
He didn't strike it rich in the West---no gold or silver did he find hin his mining days out West during the war---but he eventually found financial success although he declared bankruptcy in 1895 after a foolish investment in a printing press that lost out in the marketplace. By the time he died, Twain had regained his financial footing.
Twain outlived his wife and three of his four kids. His last years were bitter because of his losses, but he kept his promise to live until Haley's Comet returned in 1910.
Friday, May 1, 2009
About Mark Twain (4)
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
-Mark Twain
-Mark Twain
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