Tea Parties Sunday, Feb 13, 2011 11:01 ET
War Room What "original intent" would look like
By David Schultz
Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party pay homage to the original Constitution and framers who drafted the document in 1787. The House of Representatives, in a nod to them, began its session this year by reading it. Bachmann even brought Antonin Scalia to a seminar on the Constitution for members of Congress, where the Supreme Court justice instructed members to read the Federalist Papers and follow the framers' original intent. Moreover, many of the Tea Party's political positions, such as opposition to President Obama's healthcare reform program, are rooted in their adherence to the original document.
But what if they actually got their way? If a Tea Party constitutional reading suddenly took sway and we returned to the original document as conceived, what would the American republic look like? Much to the surprise of Bachmann and others, there wouldn't be that much freedom and democracy.
To begin with, the original document was silent on the right to vote. Voting rights were largely a matter of state law, and in 1787 most states limited the franchise to white, male, Protestant property owners, age 21 or older. The original Constitution did not allow for direct popular voting for president or the United States Senate, and there was no clear language even allowing for voting for members of the House of Representatives. It took the 17th Amendment, adopted in 1913, to allow for people to vote for their senators (an amendment many Tea Party activists wish to repeal), and the Supreme Court, in two landmark cases in the 20th century, found that the right to vote for House members and in state and local elections was located in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution and in the First Amendment.
Today there is still no right to vote directly for president, and it's only by the whim of state legislatures that there is a popular vote for that office. Had an original or plain reading of the Constitution been employed along the lines they advocate, many Tea Party activists would not have been able to vote last November. Finally, the original Constitution was silent on the right of women to vote, and states did deny them the franchise. It wasn't until 1920, with the adoption of the 19th Amendment, that women were given the right to vote. Without this amendment, there is no guarantee that Michele Bachmann would ever have been allowed to vote, let alone run for office.
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The original Constitution didn't include a Bill of Rights. Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers and authors of the Federalist Papers, argued against it. The Bill of Rights protects many rights the Tea Party considers hallowed, such as the freedom of speech and assembly and a right to bear arms. Lacking a Bill of Rights, these freedoms wouldn't be protected against limitation by the national government. Moreover, the Tenth Amendment, which declares that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the states," would not be the law of the land; thus, there would potentially be no limits on what the national government could do.
But even if we consider the Bill of Rights, which was adopted in 1791, to be part of the original Constitution, there are still many limits on its use. Most importantly, as written, the Bill of Rights limited only national power -- not state power. Notice how the First Amendment begins by declaring, "Congress shall make no law … " The most important provisions of the Bill of Rights, as Justice John Marshall stated in the 1833 case Barron v. Baltimore, weren't meant to be a limit on state power. In that case, the Court ruled that a state could take an owner's property through eminent domain without compensating him.
Subscribe to an original intent reading of the Constitution and states are free to disregard individual rights, including free speech, property, religion and others. States did just that in the early years of the Republic and into the 20th century before the Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to apply Bill of Rights provisions to the states. Most recently, the Supreme Court (with Scalia supporting it) used this incorporation tactic to apply the Second Amendment right to bear arms to states. A Tea Party constitutionalist could not have done this. So much for states as protectors of individual freedom.
And then there's the matter of slavery. Article I, Section 1 of the original Constitution permitted slavery and the slave trade. It referred to "free persons" and those "bound to service." For the purposes of census, apportionment and taxation, Indians and other persons would only be counted as three-fifths of whites. Slavery did not end until the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865. The original Constitution lacked an equal protection clause, which bans discrimination. It took the 14th Amendment in 1868 and a Supreme Court decision to create it. Lacking this clause, states were free to discriminate, and they regularly did via segregation laws.
Judicial review, or the power of the courts to declare laws unconstitutional, also wouldn't be permitted under an original intent reading. Tea Party constitutionalists now argue that the courts legislate from the bench when exercising this power, but it was the power of judicial review that made it possible just recently for two federal district court judges to declare the individual mandate in "ObamaCare" unconstitutional.
But nowhere in the original Constitution does it say that the federal courts have the power of judicial review. Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers suggests that the federal court has this power, but it wasn't until 1803 that the Supreme Court actually ruled that this power existed. Hence, a contradiction: Hamilton, a constitutional framer and author of the beloved Federalist Papers, asserts that a power that is not explicitly written in the Constitution exists and a court rules in his favor -- and then, all these years later, Tea Party constitutionalists use that power to invalidate a federal healthcare law on the basis that it violates the Constitution!
Tea Party members say healthcare should be done at the state level. If so, states like Massachusetts have far more authority to mandate individual coverage than does the federal government. The main issue regarding "ObamaCare's" constitutionality is whether the Commerce Clause -- Article I, section 8, clause 3 -- gives Congress the power to mandate that individuals purchase insurance. The Supreme Court will ultimately rule on this. But there is no question that states using what is called their police power authority -- the ability to legislate for the health, safety and welfare of their people -- could adopt an individual mandate.
And let's not forget Alexander Hamilton, who argued against the need for a bill of rights and in favor of judicial review. The famous "Report on Manufactures" and "Report on Public Credit" he prepared as George Washington's treasury secretary argued for an expansive federal government role in assisting the economy -- hardly something the Tea Party constitutionalist would endorse.
It should be clear that many of the liberties and rights today's Tea Partiers demand and benefit from just didn't exist in the original form of the Constitution. It took many amendments and clarification from the courts to secure them. On top of that, if the ideal the Tea Party espouses ever was realized, it would just mean the states would have more authority to suppress rights.
David Schultz is a Hamline University professor in the School of Business and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of more than 25 books and 70 articles on American politics, policy, and law, including a two volume constitutional law text book, "Constitutional Law in Contemporary America," published by Oxford University Press (2010). More: David Schultz
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Democracy Weakened
Op-Ed Columnist
When Democracy Weakens
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 11, 2011
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.
So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.
In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people “have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities.” Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.
The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists and think tanks and media buys and anything else they could think of. They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, “Winner-Take-All Politics”: “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many.”
As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.
When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.
As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.” (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)
It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?
The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.
I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”
I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.
When Democracy Weakens
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 11, 2011
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.
So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.
In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people “have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities.” Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.
The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists and think tanks and media buys and anything else they could think of. They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, “Winner-Take-All Politics”: “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many.”
As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.
When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.
As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.” (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)
It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?
The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.
I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”
I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
The Perils of E-Books
The Pitfalls of E-Book Buying: What to Look Out for Before You Purchase
Easy downloads and convenient storage are the chief lures of a virtual library, but ownership has some irritating downsides that require your attention before you hit the e-book purchase button.
By Melissa J. Perenson Feb 10, 2011 9:28 pm
Buying e-books sounds so easy, and using them seems so effortless. The books are a breeze to purchase, and you can easily store great numbers of them, especially if your e-reader has a removable storage card.
Not surprisingly, e-book sales are jumping. In fact, a report by Forrester Research predicts that sales of digital titles (and readers) will top $1 billion in 2011. And the New York Times this week started adding e-books to its weekly Best Sellers list.
As your collection grows, though, so does your need to manage the resulting virtual library. IF you aren't careful, you'll find yourself with books purchased on Amazon.com that are readable only on an Amazon Kindle e-reader device or app, books purchased at Barnes & Noble that require a Nook e-reader device or app, books purchased through Apple that are viewable only on the Apple iBooks app, and so on.
The issue of incompatible formats and the difficulty of organizing books that you buy from different e-book sellers are two things that you should consider before committing to a specific e-book platform.
Book Management
In the days of physical bookshelves filled with physical books, most people tended to organize their libraries haphazardly--perhaps by subject, perhaps alphabetically, perhaps by what size of books a particular shelf could accommodate. But with a little effort you could (probably) quickly scan your collection and walk away with the title you wished to read in short order.
Unfortunately, the lack of a universal bookshelf is a huge issue in the e-book world. Buy a book, and if you want to read it again three years down the line, you'll have to remember where and how you bought it.
A Google search reveals various software programs designed to "convert" e-books. But generally, such programs entail converting what you have into a PDFfile--and most types of e-reader software and hardware do a crummy job with handling PDFs.
Ultimately, what consumers need is e-books that they can buy and read anywhere, using any software they choose on any device they have at hand, whether it be a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a PC. No muss, no fuss. This issue is critical to library management and to the future success of e-books.
The concept of buy-anywhere content will drive the digital publishing industry, according to a new study from ABI Research. The flexibility of the multiplatform world established by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo has its good points, but consumers need more.
In the study--"Digital Publishing for Portable Devices"--ABI notes that digital sales of books, newspapers, and magazines are expected to grow to nearly $16.5 billion worldwide in 2016. That figure is more than five times greater the corresponding number for 2010, and it approaches half the total for the publishing industry as a whole. We wouldn't be surprised if the rise in digital sales were even more rapid if the current barriers among types of software and devices broke down entirely.
The E-Book Format Morass
Amazon KindleToday, the e-books you buy are closely tied by digital rights management technology to a particular seller or reading device. This state of affairs dates back to when Amazon launched its first Kindle e-reader (and Kindle e-book format) in 2007. Amazon remains the only bookseller to require customers to use a proprietary format (albeit one based on the Mobi book format) in its e-book readers, be they hardware devices or software apps; even public-domain books purchased via Amazon use Amazon Kindle formatting. As a result, none of these titles are readable on other, non-Amazon e-book app readers or hardware devices. To see why this is a problem, just look at how many entries Wikipeida has for e-book formats. (PCWorld rates the top e-readers.)
The digital rights management issue remains a point of distinction between Amazon and its competitors. Sony and Kobo, which sell e-book readers as well as e-books, are quick to point out that they, unlike Amazon, use the industry standard ePub format; Apple does, too.
But ePub support alone isn't synonymous with cross-platform support. Applying DRM to an ePub file can make the ePub book incompatible with other e-readers (be they software or hardware). For example, Adobe Digital Editions ePubs that carry DRM can be read by other software or devices (like Sony's Digital Reader series of e-readers) that support Adobe Digital Editions. But if you use Adobe's PC-based library manager, you'll have to jump through the hoop of entering an Adobe ID.
Barnes & Noble's e-book shopping experience can be even more confusing: The company has voiced support for ePub, and it offers ePub-formatted books; but when you buy a book, you have no way of knowing whether it has DRM protected. If it is, it's locked to Barnes & Noble's system. Furthermore, if you want to redownload an e-book you bought from Barnes & Noble, you'll have to provide the credit card number that you used to buy it originally.
Apple iBooksApple applies its own DRM on top of ePub, so don't bother trying to port titles that you buy at iBooks over to anything other than an Apple iOS-based device (such as an iPad or an iPhone). And Google Books, the latest comer in the e-bookseller arena, brings its own DRM to bear.
The E-Book Apps Trap
It's easy to assume that if you buy a Kindle, you'll shop at Amazon.Nevertheless, the concept of "buy once, read anywhere" is flourishing. Though Amazon, B&N, and Kobo sell their own hardware, they make Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and PC apps available as well. Effectively this means that you can read books, magazines, or newspapers that you purchase at one of these stores on most devices you're likely to have in the future--if you use the appropriate platform's app.
Effectively, this means that the e-books you buy are trapped in an association with a single software reader. If you buy wherever an e-book happens to be priced lowest, or if you use a gift card to buy books from a particular store, those books will be tied to the store where you bought them. The idea of maintaining a single digital bookshelf where you can search for all of your e-books vanishes.You can use the free open-source Calibre software to convert files from one platform to another, but the translations can be rough, and the reflow and pagination may not be work properly.)
The appeal of buy-anywhere is twofold. First, consumers need the freedom to shop freely at different e-bookstores, just as they can shop for Blu-ray movie discs at any of a number of retailers, online or otherwise.Second, consumers need to be able to view the contents of their purchased libraries in a unified fashion. The more books we collect, the greater will be our need to be able to organize our collection. The on-board e-reader organizational tools are fine for a handful of books, but for dozens or hundreds of books accumulated over the years, they're inadequate.
Easy downloads and convenient storage are the chief lures of a virtual library, but ownership has some irritating downsides that require your attention before you hit the e-book purchase button.
By Melissa J. Perenson Feb 10, 2011 9:28 pm
Buying e-books sounds so easy, and using them seems so effortless. The books are a breeze to purchase, and you can easily store great numbers of them, especially if your e-reader has a removable storage card.
Not surprisingly, e-book sales are jumping. In fact, a report by Forrester Research predicts that sales of digital titles (and readers) will top $1 billion in 2011. And the New York Times this week started adding e-books to its weekly Best Sellers list.
As your collection grows, though, so does your need to manage the resulting virtual library. IF you aren't careful, you'll find yourself with books purchased on Amazon.com that are readable only on an Amazon Kindle e-reader device or app, books purchased at Barnes & Noble that require a Nook e-reader device or app, books purchased through Apple that are viewable only on the Apple iBooks app, and so on.
The issue of incompatible formats and the difficulty of organizing books that you buy from different e-book sellers are two things that you should consider before committing to a specific e-book platform.
Book Management
In the days of physical bookshelves filled with physical books, most people tended to organize their libraries haphazardly--perhaps by subject, perhaps alphabetically, perhaps by what size of books a particular shelf could accommodate. But with a little effort you could (probably) quickly scan your collection and walk away with the title you wished to read in short order.
Unfortunately, the lack of a universal bookshelf is a huge issue in the e-book world. Buy a book, and if you want to read it again three years down the line, you'll have to remember where and how you bought it.
A Google search reveals various software programs designed to "convert" e-books. But generally, such programs entail converting what you have into a PDFfile--and most types of e-reader software and hardware do a crummy job with handling PDFs.
Ultimately, what consumers need is e-books that they can buy and read anywhere, using any software they choose on any device they have at hand, whether it be a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a PC. No muss, no fuss. This issue is critical to library management and to the future success of e-books.
The concept of buy-anywhere content will drive the digital publishing industry, according to a new study from ABI Research. The flexibility of the multiplatform world established by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo has its good points, but consumers need more.
In the study--"Digital Publishing for Portable Devices"--ABI notes that digital sales of books, newspapers, and magazines are expected to grow to nearly $16.5 billion worldwide in 2016. That figure is more than five times greater the corresponding number for 2010, and it approaches half the total for the publishing industry as a whole. We wouldn't be surprised if the rise in digital sales were even more rapid if the current barriers among types of software and devices broke down entirely.
The E-Book Format Morass
Amazon KindleToday, the e-books you buy are closely tied by digital rights management technology to a particular seller or reading device. This state of affairs dates back to when Amazon launched its first Kindle e-reader (and Kindle e-book format) in 2007. Amazon remains the only bookseller to require customers to use a proprietary format (albeit one based on the Mobi book format) in its e-book readers, be they hardware devices or software apps; even public-domain books purchased via Amazon use Amazon Kindle formatting. As a result, none of these titles are readable on other, non-Amazon e-book app readers or hardware devices. To see why this is a problem, just look at how many entries Wikipeida has for e-book formats. (PCWorld rates the top e-readers.)
The digital rights management issue remains a point of distinction between Amazon and its competitors. Sony and Kobo, which sell e-book readers as well as e-books, are quick to point out that they, unlike Amazon, use the industry standard ePub format; Apple does, too.
But ePub support alone isn't synonymous with cross-platform support. Applying DRM to an ePub file can make the ePub book incompatible with other e-readers (be they software or hardware). For example, Adobe Digital Editions ePubs that carry DRM can be read by other software or devices (like Sony's Digital Reader series of e-readers) that support Adobe Digital Editions. But if you use Adobe's PC-based library manager, you'll have to jump through the hoop of entering an Adobe ID.
Barnes & Noble's e-book shopping experience can be even more confusing: The company has voiced support for ePub, and it offers ePub-formatted books; but when you buy a book, you have no way of knowing whether it has DRM protected. If it is, it's locked to Barnes & Noble's system. Furthermore, if you want to redownload an e-book you bought from Barnes & Noble, you'll have to provide the credit card number that you used to buy it originally.
Apple iBooksApple applies its own DRM on top of ePub, so don't bother trying to port titles that you buy at iBooks over to anything other than an Apple iOS-based device (such as an iPad or an iPhone). And Google Books, the latest comer in the e-bookseller arena, brings its own DRM to bear.
The E-Book Apps Trap
It's easy to assume that if you buy a Kindle, you'll shop at Amazon.Nevertheless, the concept of "buy once, read anywhere" is flourishing. Though Amazon, B&N, and Kobo sell their own hardware, they make Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and PC apps available as well. Effectively this means that you can read books, magazines, or newspapers that you purchase at one of these stores on most devices you're likely to have in the future--if you use the appropriate platform's app.
Effectively, this means that the e-books you buy are trapped in an association with a single software reader. If you buy wherever an e-book happens to be priced lowest, or if you use a gift card to buy books from a particular store, those books will be tied to the store where you bought them. The idea of maintaining a single digital bookshelf where you can search for all of your e-books vanishes.You can use the free open-source Calibre software to convert files from one platform to another, but the translations can be rough, and the reflow and pagination may not be work properly.)
The appeal of buy-anywhere is twofold. First, consumers need the freedom to shop freely at different e-bookstores, just as they can shop for Blu-ray movie discs at any of a number of retailers, online or otherwise.Second, consumers need to be able to view the contents of their purchased libraries in a unified fashion. The more books we collect, the greater will be our need to be able to organize our collection. The on-board e-reader organizational tools are fine for a handful of books, but for dozens or hundreds of books accumulated over the years, they're inadequate.
Republican's Bridge to the 19th Century
Op-Ed Columnist
Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 10, 2011
There was a time when Republicans used to refer to themselves, proudly, as “the party of Lincoln.” But you don’t hear that line much these days. Why?
The main answer, presumably, lies in the G.O.P.’s decision, long ago, to seek votes from Southerners angered by the end of legal segregation. With the old Confederacy now the heart of the Republican base, boasting about the party’s Civil War-era legacy is no longer advisable.
But sooner or later, Republicans were bound to notice other reasons to disavow Lincoln. He was, after all, the first president to institute an income tax. And he was also the first president to issue a paper currency — the “greenback” — that wasn’t backed by gold or silver. “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its people than to debase its currency,” declared Representative Paul Ryan in one of two hearings Congress held on Wednesday on monetary policy. So much, then, for the Great Liberator.
Which brings me to the story of what went on in those monetary hearings.
One of the hearings was called by Representative Ron Paul, a harsh critic of the Federal Reserve, who now has an oversight role over the very institution he wants abolished in favor of a return to the gold standard. Mr. Paul’s subcommittee called three witnesses, one of whom was an odd choice: Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
What was odd about that choice? Well, Mr. DiLorenzo hasn’t actually written much about monetary policy, although he has described Fed policy — not just recently, but since the 1960s — as “legalized counterfeiting operations.” His main claim to fame, instead, is as a critic of Lincoln — he’s the author of “Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” — and as a modern-day secessionist.
No, really: calls for secession run through many of Mr. DiLorenzo’s writings — for example, in his declaration that “healthcare freedom” won’t be restored until “some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state.” Raise the rebel flag!
O.K., it’s going to be a while before the G.O.P. as a whole embraces neo-secessionism, and Mr. Paul, although highly visible, is, in fact, a somewhat marginal figure even within his own party. But Mr. Ryan, who led the other hearing — the one at which Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, testified — is a rising Republican star. So it’s worth noting that Mr. Ryan’s hard-money rhetoric was nearly as bizarre as Mr. DiLorenzo’s.
Start with that bit about debasing our currency. Where did that come from? The dollar’s value in terms of other major currencies is about the same now as it was three years ago. And as Mr. Bernanke pointed out, consumer prices rose only 1.2 percent in 2010, an inflation rate that, for the record, is well below the rate under the sainted Ronald Reagan. The Fed’s preferred measure, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was up only 0.7 percent, well below the target of around 2 percent.
But Mr. Ryan is sure that the dollar is being debased and won’t take no for an answer. In an attempt to create a gotcha moment, he waved a copy of a newspaper bearing the headline “Inflation Worries Spread” at the Fed chairman. But the gotcha actually went the other way. As Mr. Bernanke immediately pointed out, the article was about inflation in China and other emerging markets, not in the United States. And the Fed chairman declared, correctly, that “inflation made here in the U.S. is very, very low.”
Advantage Bernanke. But the facts don’t matter, because conservative hard-money mania, the demand that the Fed stop trying to rescue the economy, isn’t really about inflation fears.
Mr. Ryan said as much in Wednesday’s hearing, in which he declared that our currency “should be guided by the rule of law, not the rule of men.” A few years ago, my response would have been, say what? After all, even Milton Friedman saw the conduct of monetary policy as a technical issue, not a matter of principle; his complaint about the Fed’s role in the Great Depression was that it didn’t print enough money, not that it printed too much.
But then Friedman, who believed that it sometimes makes sense to let your currency depreciate, who urged Japan’s central bank to adopt a policy very similar to what the Fed is doing now, was a leftist by the standards of today’s G.O.P.
Wednesday’s hearings aren’t likely to have any immediate effect on monetary policy. But they offer a revealing — and appalling — look at the mind-set of one of our two major political parties. We’ve always known that the modern G.O.P. wants to take America back to the way it was before the New Deal; but now it’s clear that the party wants to build a bridge to the 19th century, and maybe even to the antebellum era. Backward, march!
Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 10, 2011
There was a time when Republicans used to refer to themselves, proudly, as “the party of Lincoln.” But you don’t hear that line much these days. Why?
The main answer, presumably, lies in the G.O.P.’s decision, long ago, to seek votes from Southerners angered by the end of legal segregation. With the old Confederacy now the heart of the Republican base, boasting about the party’s Civil War-era legacy is no longer advisable.
But sooner or later, Republicans were bound to notice other reasons to disavow Lincoln. He was, after all, the first president to institute an income tax. And he was also the first president to issue a paper currency — the “greenback” — that wasn’t backed by gold or silver. “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its people than to debase its currency,” declared Representative Paul Ryan in one of two hearings Congress held on Wednesday on monetary policy. So much, then, for the Great Liberator.
Which brings me to the story of what went on in those monetary hearings.
One of the hearings was called by Representative Ron Paul, a harsh critic of the Federal Reserve, who now has an oversight role over the very institution he wants abolished in favor of a return to the gold standard. Mr. Paul’s subcommittee called three witnesses, one of whom was an odd choice: Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
What was odd about that choice? Well, Mr. DiLorenzo hasn’t actually written much about monetary policy, although he has described Fed policy — not just recently, but since the 1960s — as “legalized counterfeiting operations.” His main claim to fame, instead, is as a critic of Lincoln — he’s the author of “Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” — and as a modern-day secessionist.
No, really: calls for secession run through many of Mr. DiLorenzo’s writings — for example, in his declaration that “healthcare freedom” won’t be restored until “some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state.” Raise the rebel flag!
O.K., it’s going to be a while before the G.O.P. as a whole embraces neo-secessionism, and Mr. Paul, although highly visible, is, in fact, a somewhat marginal figure even within his own party. But Mr. Ryan, who led the other hearing — the one at which Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, testified — is a rising Republican star. So it’s worth noting that Mr. Ryan’s hard-money rhetoric was nearly as bizarre as Mr. DiLorenzo’s.
Start with that bit about debasing our currency. Where did that come from? The dollar’s value in terms of other major currencies is about the same now as it was three years ago. And as Mr. Bernanke pointed out, consumer prices rose only 1.2 percent in 2010, an inflation rate that, for the record, is well below the rate under the sainted Ronald Reagan. The Fed’s preferred measure, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was up only 0.7 percent, well below the target of around 2 percent.
But Mr. Ryan is sure that the dollar is being debased and won’t take no for an answer. In an attempt to create a gotcha moment, he waved a copy of a newspaper bearing the headline “Inflation Worries Spread” at the Fed chairman. But the gotcha actually went the other way. As Mr. Bernanke immediately pointed out, the article was about inflation in China and other emerging markets, not in the United States. And the Fed chairman declared, correctly, that “inflation made here in the U.S. is very, very low.”
Advantage Bernanke. But the facts don’t matter, because conservative hard-money mania, the demand that the Fed stop trying to rescue the economy, isn’t really about inflation fears.
Mr. Ryan said as much in Wednesday’s hearing, in which he declared that our currency “should be guided by the rule of law, not the rule of men.” A few years ago, my response would have been, say what? After all, even Milton Friedman saw the conduct of monetary policy as a technical issue, not a matter of principle; his complaint about the Fed’s role in the Great Depression was that it didn’t print enough money, not that it printed too much.
But then Friedman, who believed that it sometimes makes sense to let your currency depreciate, who urged Japan’s central bank to adopt a policy very similar to what the Fed is doing now, was a leftist by the standards of today’s G.O.P.
Wednesday’s hearings aren’t likely to have any immediate effect on monetary policy. But they offer a revealing — and appalling — look at the mind-set of one of our two major political parties. We’ve always known that the modern G.O.P. wants to take America back to the way it was before the New Deal; but now it’s clear that the party wants to build a bridge to the 19th century, and maybe even to the antebellum era. Backward, march!
Two Views of the Internet
The Computer Made Me Do It
Illustration by Christoph Niemann
By WILLIAM SALETAN
Published: February 11, 2011
Humanity is migrating to cyberspace. In the past five years, Americans have doubled the hours they spend online, exceeding their television time and more than tripling the time they spend reading newspapers or magazines. Most now play computer or video games regularly, about 13 hours a week on average. By age 21, the average young American has spent at least three times as many hours playing virtual games as reading. It took humankind eight years to spend 100 million hours building Wikipedia. We now spend at least 200 million hours a week playing World of Warcraft.
The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
By Elias Aboujaoude
349 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
REALITY IS BROKEN
Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
By Jane McGonigal
Illustrated. 388 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95.
Elias Aboujaoude, a Silicon Valley psychiatrist, finds this alarming. In “Virtually You,” he argues that the Internet is unleashing our worst instincts. It connects you to whatever you want: gambling, overspending, sex with strangers. It speeds transactions, facilitating impulse purchases and luring you away from the difficulties of real life. It lets you customize your fantasies and select a date from millions of profiles, sapping your patience for imperfect partners. It lets you pick congenial news sources and avoid contrary views and information. It conceals your identity, freeing you to be vitriolic or dishonest. It shields you from detection and disapproval, emboldening you to download test answers and term papers. It hides the pain of others, liberating your cruelty in games and forums. It rewards self-promotion on blogs and Facebook. It teaches you how to induce bulimic vomiting or kill yourself.
In short, everything you thought was good about the Internet — information, access, personalization — is bad. Aboujaoude isn’t shy in his indictment. He links the Internet to consumer debt, the housing crash, eating disorders, sexually transmitted infections, psychopathy, racism, terrorism, child sexual abuse, suicide and murder. Everything online worries him: ads, hyperlinks, even emoticons. The Internet makes us too quarrelsome. It makes us too like-minded. It makes us work too little. It makes us work too much.
In part, this grim view stems from Aboujaoude’s work. He sees patients with online compulsions. He believes in the Freudian id — a shadowy swirl of infantile impulses — and perceives its modern incarnation in what he calls the “e-personality,” a parallel identity that hijacks your mind online. In the physical world, your superego restrains your id. But in the virtual world, where you can instantly fulfill your whims, the narcissism and grandiosity of the e-personality run wild.
To Aboujaoude, the Internet is a mechanical alien, “a new type of machine . . . that can efficiently prey on our basic instincts.” It converts children into bullies “almost automatically.” It turned Philip Markoff, the accused “Craigslist killer,” who committed suicide in jail, into a serial assailant. Lori Drew, the woman whose online impersonation of a teenage boy supposedly drove a girl to suicide, seemed normal until “the Internet made her fleeting dark wish . . . take on a life of its own.” Again and again, computers get the blame.
Jane McGonigal, the author of “Reality Is Broken,” sees the Internet differently. She’s a game designer. To her, the virtual world isn’t a foreign contraption. It’s our own evolving creation. She agrees that bad online games can addict people, make them belligerent, distract them from reality and leave them empty. But this is our fault, not the Internet’s. When virtual life brings out the worst in us, redesign it.
If Aboujaoude is the Internet’s Hobbes, McGonigal is its Rousseau. In the rise of multiplayer games, she sees a happier picture of human nature — a thirst for community, a craving for hard work and a love of rules. This, she argues, is the essence of games: rules, a challenge and a shared objective. The trick is to design games that reward good behavior. The Internet’s unprecedented power, its ability to envelop and interact with us, is a blessing, not a threat. We can build worlds in which nice guys finish first.
The point isn’t just to enhance virtual reality. It’s to fix the real world, too. McGonigal offers several examples, some of which she helped create. Chore Wars, an alternate-reality game, builds positive attitudes toward housework by rewarding virtual housework. Cruel 2 B Kind invites players to “kill” competitors with smiles or compliments. The Extraordinaries hands out missions like one in which the player must GPS-tag a defibrillator so its location can be registered for later use. Groundcrew assigns players to help people with transportation, shopping or housekeeping.
VIRTUALLY YOU
The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
The premise is that since games motivate us more effectively than real life, making them altruistic and bringing them into the physical world will promote altruistic behavior. But is this motivating power transferable? What draws us to virtual worlds, McGonigal notes, is their “carefully designed pleasures” and “thrilling challenges” customized to our strengths. They’re never boring. They let us choose our missions and control our work flow. They make us feel powerful. They offer “a guarantee of productivity” in every quest. And when we fail, they make our failure entertaining.
Reality doesn’t work this way. Floors need scrubbing. Garbage needs hauling. Invalids need their bedpans washed. This work isn’t designed for your pleasure or stimulation. It just needs to be done.
McGonigal points to studies suggesting that games that reward socially constructive behavior promote such behavior in real life. But the only outputs measured by these studies are self-reported values, self-reported behavior in the real world, and objectively measured behavior in games. Where’s the reliable evidence that this data translates to people’s doing more real work? Projects like Groundcrew, McGonigal concedes, have produced “modest if any results so far.” Hundreds of thousands of people play Free Rice, a game designed to feed the hungry, but the rice comes from advertisers, not players. Thousands sign up every day for Folding@home, a game to cure diseases, but all these players contribute is processing power on game consoles.
If reality is inherently less attractive than games, then the virtual world won’t save the physical world. It will empty it. Millions of gamers, in McGonigal’s words, are “opting out” of the bummer of real life. And they aren’t coming back. Halo 3, for example, has become a complete virtual world, with its own history documented in an online museum and Ken Burns-style videos. McGonigal calls this war game a model for inspiring mass cooperation. Two years ago, its 15 million players reached a long-sought objective: They killed their 10 billionth alien. “Fresh off one collective achievement, Halo players were ready to tackle an even more monumental goal,” McGonigal writes. And what goal did they choose? Feeding the hungry? Clothing the poor? No. The new goal was to kill 100 billion aliens.
Game designers can’t be counted on to arrest this trend. McGonigal says the game industry wants to help users avoid addiction so that they’ll remain functional and keep buying its products. But we’ve heard that argument before from the tobacco industry. Addiction, as a business model, is too addictive to give up. She says Foursquare, a game that rewards you for going out with friends and “checking in” at restaurants, promotes sociability. That would be nice, but the game’s Web site devotes a whole section (“Foursquare for Business”) to commercial exploitation.
The Internet isn’t heaven. It isn’t hell, either. It’s just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized. It will need rules, monitoring and benevolent designers who understand the flaws of its inhabitants. If Aboujaoude is right about our weakness for virtual vice, we’ll need all the McGonigals we can get.
Illustration by Christoph Niemann
By WILLIAM SALETAN
Published: February 11, 2011
Humanity is migrating to cyberspace. In the past five years, Americans have doubled the hours they spend online, exceeding their television time and more than tripling the time they spend reading newspapers or magazines. Most now play computer or video games regularly, about 13 hours a week on average. By age 21, the average young American has spent at least three times as many hours playing virtual games as reading. It took humankind eight years to spend 100 million hours building Wikipedia. We now spend at least 200 million hours a week playing World of Warcraft.
The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
By Elias Aboujaoude
349 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
REALITY IS BROKEN
Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
By Jane McGonigal
Illustrated. 388 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95.
Elias Aboujaoude, a Silicon Valley psychiatrist, finds this alarming. In “Virtually You,” he argues that the Internet is unleashing our worst instincts. It connects you to whatever you want: gambling, overspending, sex with strangers. It speeds transactions, facilitating impulse purchases and luring you away from the difficulties of real life. It lets you customize your fantasies and select a date from millions of profiles, sapping your patience for imperfect partners. It lets you pick congenial news sources and avoid contrary views and information. It conceals your identity, freeing you to be vitriolic or dishonest. It shields you from detection and disapproval, emboldening you to download test answers and term papers. It hides the pain of others, liberating your cruelty in games and forums. It rewards self-promotion on blogs and Facebook. It teaches you how to induce bulimic vomiting or kill yourself.
In short, everything you thought was good about the Internet — information, access, personalization — is bad. Aboujaoude isn’t shy in his indictment. He links the Internet to consumer debt, the housing crash, eating disorders, sexually transmitted infections, psychopathy, racism, terrorism, child sexual abuse, suicide and murder. Everything online worries him: ads, hyperlinks, even emoticons. The Internet makes us too quarrelsome. It makes us too like-minded. It makes us work too little. It makes us work too much.
In part, this grim view stems from Aboujaoude’s work. He sees patients with online compulsions. He believes in the Freudian id — a shadowy swirl of infantile impulses — and perceives its modern incarnation in what he calls the “e-personality,” a parallel identity that hijacks your mind online. In the physical world, your superego restrains your id. But in the virtual world, where you can instantly fulfill your whims, the narcissism and grandiosity of the e-personality run wild.
To Aboujaoude, the Internet is a mechanical alien, “a new type of machine . . . that can efficiently prey on our basic instincts.” It converts children into bullies “almost automatically.” It turned Philip Markoff, the accused “Craigslist killer,” who committed suicide in jail, into a serial assailant. Lori Drew, the woman whose online impersonation of a teenage boy supposedly drove a girl to suicide, seemed normal until “the Internet made her fleeting dark wish . . . take on a life of its own.” Again and again, computers get the blame.
Jane McGonigal, the author of “Reality Is Broken,” sees the Internet differently. She’s a game designer. To her, the virtual world isn’t a foreign contraption. It’s our own evolving creation. She agrees that bad online games can addict people, make them belligerent, distract them from reality and leave them empty. But this is our fault, not the Internet’s. When virtual life brings out the worst in us, redesign it.
If Aboujaoude is the Internet’s Hobbes, McGonigal is its Rousseau. In the rise of multiplayer games, she sees a happier picture of human nature — a thirst for community, a craving for hard work and a love of rules. This, she argues, is the essence of games: rules, a challenge and a shared objective. The trick is to design games that reward good behavior. The Internet’s unprecedented power, its ability to envelop and interact with us, is a blessing, not a threat. We can build worlds in which nice guys finish first.
The point isn’t just to enhance virtual reality. It’s to fix the real world, too. McGonigal offers several examples, some of which she helped create. Chore Wars, an alternate-reality game, builds positive attitudes toward housework by rewarding virtual housework. Cruel 2 B Kind invites players to “kill” competitors with smiles or compliments. The Extraordinaries hands out missions like one in which the player must GPS-tag a defibrillator so its location can be registered for later use. Groundcrew assigns players to help people with transportation, shopping or housekeeping.
VIRTUALLY YOU
The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
The premise is that since games motivate us more effectively than real life, making them altruistic and bringing them into the physical world will promote altruistic behavior. But is this motivating power transferable? What draws us to virtual worlds, McGonigal notes, is their “carefully designed pleasures” and “thrilling challenges” customized to our strengths. They’re never boring. They let us choose our missions and control our work flow. They make us feel powerful. They offer “a guarantee of productivity” in every quest. And when we fail, they make our failure entertaining.
Reality doesn’t work this way. Floors need scrubbing. Garbage needs hauling. Invalids need their bedpans washed. This work isn’t designed for your pleasure or stimulation. It just needs to be done.
McGonigal points to studies suggesting that games that reward socially constructive behavior promote such behavior in real life. But the only outputs measured by these studies are self-reported values, self-reported behavior in the real world, and objectively measured behavior in games. Where’s the reliable evidence that this data translates to people’s doing more real work? Projects like Groundcrew, McGonigal concedes, have produced “modest if any results so far.” Hundreds of thousands of people play Free Rice, a game designed to feed the hungry, but the rice comes from advertisers, not players. Thousands sign up every day for Folding@home, a game to cure diseases, but all these players contribute is processing power on game consoles.
If reality is inherently less attractive than games, then the virtual world won’t save the physical world. It will empty it. Millions of gamers, in McGonigal’s words, are “opting out” of the bummer of real life. And they aren’t coming back. Halo 3, for example, has become a complete virtual world, with its own history documented in an online museum and Ken Burns-style videos. McGonigal calls this war game a model for inspiring mass cooperation. Two years ago, its 15 million players reached a long-sought objective: They killed their 10 billionth alien. “Fresh off one collective achievement, Halo players were ready to tackle an even more monumental goal,” McGonigal writes. And what goal did they choose? Feeding the hungry? Clothing the poor? No. The new goal was to kill 100 billion aliens.
Game designers can’t be counted on to arrest this trend. McGonigal says the game industry wants to help users avoid addiction so that they’ll remain functional and keep buying its products. But we’ve heard that argument before from the tobacco industry. Addiction, as a business model, is too addictive to give up. She says Foursquare, a game that rewards you for going out with friends and “checking in” at restaurants, promotes sociability. That would be nice, but the game’s Web site devotes a whole section (“Foursquare for Business”) to commercial exploitation.
The Internet isn’t heaven. It isn’t hell, either. It’s just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized. It will need rules, monitoring and benevolent designers who understand the flaws of its inhabitants. If Aboujaoude is right about our weakness for virtual vice, we’ll need all the McGonigals we can get.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
World without Borders
What the author says about bookstores can also be said about libraries.
Ilana RossYouthful Commentator
Posted: February 3, 2011 01:10
A World Without Borders
I'll tell you what I'm not getting my best friend for her birthday: a Kindle. For one thing, she's turning twenty-three, not forty-five. For another thing, I only spend that kind of money on shoes.
But most importantly, I won't buy an e-reader because I refuse to be complicit in a phenomenon which threatens to destroy what I love most about America and consumerism: bookstores. For those of you keeping track on Amazon, e-books are an increasingly hot commodity, while old print editions of The Catcher in The Rye go for a bag of Fritos. And as books go out of fashion, so do the bookstores.
Books have been a dying breed of entertainment since before the emergence of the e-reader, or really whenever it was people discovered how great television and movies are. Why spend the day reading Little House on The Prairie, when you can watch the ladies all grown up in Sex and The City?
It's one thing to lament the inevitable decline of the book, but there are bigger things at stake here. After all, what's a bookstore without any books? A candle shop? The Papery?
These days, independent bookstores are few and far between. But it's not just the mom-and-pop establishments that are "biting the dust" or barely surviving in a brutal economy. Last year Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale, and Borders looks to be on its last legs as well. Don't be swayed by its seamless packaging and effortless efficiency; the e-reader spells trouble.
Bookstores are feeling the winds of change, and struggling to adapt. Last winter when I walked into my local B & N, I noticed that the "New in Paperback" section had been replaced by a stand advertising the new e-reader. I was appalled. The "booksellers" here were peddling the very instrument designed to destroy them.
Where were the books whose covers I liked to judge and whose pages I liked to bend before not buying them? They'd been moved to the next table over, like displaced persons in a corporate refugee camp. We ought to seriously consider just what we'll be missing if electronic reading becomes the norm. In a dystopian world without bookstores, where will I go when I need to find the right mind space, to read free magazines and pick out coffee table books for my imaginary coffee table? Bookstores are what's to do when you're half an hour early to a movie or a dinner date. It's where the homeless and privileged alike can sit in opposing armchairs and enjoy a Dean Koontz thriller or a Nora Ephron classic. Because rich or poor, we all feel bad about our neck.
Bookstores are places for imagination, for serious reflection, for a skinny vanilla latte. Bookstores recognize that the best part of life is in the browsing, that non-committal time when you let yourself believe that you could be the kind of person who reads Ishiguro. When you mosey through a bookstore, you don't rely on computerized "genius" estimations of what you might like, but instead leave it up to chance and a wandering eye.
When I walk through the "Teen Paranormal Romance" stacks, I can skim the bestselling books of all time. When I make my way into the nonfiction area, I give myself time to delight in the tables of Soviet era biographies that I'll never read but will think about maybe buying for my Dad.
Imagine that in a future world without bookstores, when the next Harry Potter book finally comes out, my kids won't be able to line up in their costumes and dance around at their local bookstore at midnight. No, they'll be out on the street, waiting to download it onto their personal touch Pads or whatever gadget they've come up with to replace all need for human interaction. I'll pick them up from the corner in my motorpod and I'll warn them not to associate too much with the Druids, because I don't trust a robot, or anybody who can't think for herself.
The rise of the electronic reader is no surprise in an era where machines are proving more capable and error-proof than ever. They have only automated check-outs now at my local CVS, giving lonely people one less opportunity to chat about the weather and whether the Mentos are on 2 for 1 sale.
I worry that when we foreclose bookstores to the online world, we are sending more than a message to our books that they're out of stock and unwanted, but to our next generation: that there's no time for browsing, for nonsense, for taking more time to do something that can be done with one or maybe two clicks.
Gutenberg would be very old today, and he probably would be more interested in the development of indoor plumbing than anything else, but I wonder what Johann van would have to say about what's become of his invention and the stores that housed them. Probably something in German.
I hate to argue against the passing of time, modernization and technological advance because it seems pointless. I'm not sure bookstores can be saved, and I'm not advocating a mass Kindle burning or anything radical. I'm just hoping that we can preserve some semblance of life outside our PCs (and/or Macs).
Ilana RossYouthful Commentator
Posted: February 3, 2011 01:10
A World Without Borders
I'll tell you what I'm not getting my best friend for her birthday: a Kindle. For one thing, she's turning twenty-three, not forty-five. For another thing, I only spend that kind of money on shoes.
But most importantly, I won't buy an e-reader because I refuse to be complicit in a phenomenon which threatens to destroy what I love most about America and consumerism: bookstores. For those of you keeping track on Amazon, e-books are an increasingly hot commodity, while old print editions of The Catcher in The Rye go for a bag of Fritos. And as books go out of fashion, so do the bookstores.
Books have been a dying breed of entertainment since before the emergence of the e-reader, or really whenever it was people discovered how great television and movies are. Why spend the day reading Little House on The Prairie, when you can watch the ladies all grown up in Sex and The City?
It's one thing to lament the inevitable decline of the book, but there are bigger things at stake here. After all, what's a bookstore without any books? A candle shop? The Papery?
These days, independent bookstores are few and far between. But it's not just the mom-and-pop establishments that are "biting the dust" or barely surviving in a brutal economy. Last year Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale, and Borders looks to be on its last legs as well. Don't be swayed by its seamless packaging and effortless efficiency; the e-reader spells trouble.
Bookstores are feeling the winds of change, and struggling to adapt. Last winter when I walked into my local B & N, I noticed that the "New in Paperback" section had been replaced by a stand advertising the new e-reader. I was appalled. The "booksellers" here were peddling the very instrument designed to destroy them.
Where were the books whose covers I liked to judge and whose pages I liked to bend before not buying them? They'd been moved to the next table over, like displaced persons in a corporate refugee camp. We ought to seriously consider just what we'll be missing if electronic reading becomes the norm. In a dystopian world without bookstores, where will I go when I need to find the right mind space, to read free magazines and pick out coffee table books for my imaginary coffee table? Bookstores are what's to do when you're half an hour early to a movie or a dinner date. It's where the homeless and privileged alike can sit in opposing armchairs and enjoy a Dean Koontz thriller or a Nora Ephron classic. Because rich or poor, we all feel bad about our neck.
Bookstores are places for imagination, for serious reflection, for a skinny vanilla latte. Bookstores recognize that the best part of life is in the browsing, that non-committal time when you let yourself believe that you could be the kind of person who reads Ishiguro. When you mosey through a bookstore, you don't rely on computerized "genius" estimations of what you might like, but instead leave it up to chance and a wandering eye.
When I walk through the "Teen Paranormal Romance" stacks, I can skim the bestselling books of all time. When I make my way into the nonfiction area, I give myself time to delight in the tables of Soviet era biographies that I'll never read but will think about maybe buying for my Dad.
Imagine that in a future world without bookstores, when the next Harry Potter book finally comes out, my kids won't be able to line up in their costumes and dance around at their local bookstore at midnight. No, they'll be out on the street, waiting to download it onto their personal touch Pads or whatever gadget they've come up with to replace all need for human interaction. I'll pick them up from the corner in my motorpod and I'll warn them not to associate too much with the Druids, because I don't trust a robot, or anybody who can't think for herself.
The rise of the electronic reader is no surprise in an era where machines are proving more capable and error-proof than ever. They have only automated check-outs now at my local CVS, giving lonely people one less opportunity to chat about the weather and whether the Mentos are on 2 for 1 sale.
I worry that when we foreclose bookstores to the online world, we are sending more than a message to our books that they're out of stock and unwanted, but to our next generation: that there's no time for browsing, for nonsense, for taking more time to do something that can be done with one or maybe two clicks.
Gutenberg would be very old today, and he probably would be more interested in the development of indoor plumbing than anything else, but I wonder what Johann van would have to say about what's become of his invention and the stores that housed them. Probably something in German.
I hate to argue against the passing of time, modernization and technological advance because it seems pointless. I'm not sure bookstores can be saved, and I'm not advocating a mass Kindle burning or anything radical. I'm just hoping that we can preserve some semblance of life outside our PCs (and/or Macs).
Kenneth Stampp - The Causes of the Civil War
I am reading this excellent compendium of original sources on the Civil War and hope to have some conclusions as soon as I finish my reading on the subject.
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