telegraph29

Pie

Students at Brown threw a pie at Thomas Friedman, the over-rated NY Times columnist, during a speaking engagement, an act that Matthew Yglesias dubs "funny" and that Yale student Dara Lind defends thusly:

I find the consensus in this country that the only acceptable public action is speech to be incredibly disturbing. Pieing someone in the face doesn’t meaningfully “prevent” him from speaking, and registers your disapproval (and more specifically, in this case, eagerness to show up a self-styled Man of the World for the buffoon he is) much more effectively than an op-ed in your student paper can.... to exclude bodily action from acceptable public expression is to resort to a dualism that I hope we’ve moved past by now.

But there is no consensus that "the only acceptable public action is speech" -- there is clapping, booing, turning one's back to a speaker, holding aloft a Zippo (or, sadly, a cell phone) to signal approval, shaking your fist, giving a standing ovation... all of which, by the way, are more acceptable than certain kinds of speech (e.g. racist harangues, shouting at the top of one's lungs, etc.).

Throwing pies rankles, among other reasons, because it is destructive of public discourse. It contains less content than spoken dissent and imposes a far greater cost: prominent speakers aren't going to address college audiences if there is a likelihood that they'll get a pie in the face.

"Action - and especially performance — is a legitimate contribution to public discourse," Ms. Lind writes, as if any sort of action or performance is justified merely due to its physical medium! Should I ever find myself debating her in person I suppose she won't mind if I perform an experimental ballet I've developed called "Steal her microphone so the audience can only hear me," which ought to succeed even if I'm hit by a pie during the raid on her podium.

Ahistorical argument of the day

Ouch.

On flag lapel pins

James Poulos at Postmodern Conservative: 

Flag lapel pins should not be mandatory for US politicians. They should not be mandatory for anyone. They should not be the product of social pressure. They should not be understood to reflect on anyone's resolution to care more, or call upon the public to acknowledge how much more they appear to care. There is nothing wrong with a flag lapel pin, although I would not wear one regularly unless I were in the flag lapel pin manufacturing business. But we have got to make ourselves admit that the lapel pin is a tacky little thing that is only ennobled by the flag put on it, and that the more patriotic work you want the flag to do, the more the flag is actually diminished by its puny size and the cheapness of the tin it's pressed upon.

On the plus side, as refreshing as it would be to see politicians actually drape themselves in jewel-bestudded sashes of red, white, and blue, in only a few moments everyone would have one, patriotism would fuse with fashion, and instead of mandatory tacky little things we would swim in a creped-up sea of tacky enormous things. The best the lapel pin can say for itself is that so far it has shown no signs of slyly getting any larger. The worst it can say for itself, however, is what it so quickly has threatened to say for the wearer: "Rest assured, I'm just as American as I was before this fad made me have to metaphorically (but only metaphorically) prove it."

I'd personally prefer that our leaders wear shimmering coats of hummingbird feathers like the Aztecs.

Reductio ad abcsurdum

Since Jim Fallows sums up my feelings on the Democratic debate I thought I'd make a couple narrow rebuttals. On this blog Phillip Klein defends ABC, writing, "If this were the first debate between the two candidates, I can understand the frustration, but given that this is the 21st debate, it's a different story. What kind of policy discussion is left to have among two candidates who agree on virtually everything?"

It is quite right that health care and Iraq have been fleshed out. But the president does all sorts of things that Senators Obama and Clinton are seldom if ever asked about. Tough questions I'd like to see include whether the candidates believe that the constitution in fact assigns only enumerated powers to the federal government, and if so what specific powers belong only to the states or the people; whether the candidates believe that the War on Drugs is winnable and how they would wage it or end it; and the candidates' views on the balance of power between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary branches during war time.

Another citizen might prefer that questions be asked on animal rights, maintaining the interstate highway system, the prudence of a regulated market for kidneys and the reasoning for our reliance on corn based rather than sugar based ethanol. There is no shortage of topics; moderators just confine themselves unnecessarily.

Enter David Brooks, defending the ABC debate moderators on different grounds. He says, echoing others, that "the journalist's job is to make politicians uncomfortable," and that it's legitimate to see how they'll respond to symbolic issues. If that is so, however, the moderators seemed to have failed for a different reason -- I can imagine the candidates being far less comfortable and being asked far more symbolic questions than what ABC mustered.

Perhaps a future debate should feature Brooks as moderator posing the following questions:

-- A black child, a white child and a Cuban refugee child are all drowning and you can only save two. Which two children do you save?

-- A terrorist makes a credible threat that he will detonate a nuclear device in Manhattan unless you engage in intercourse with the spouse of your opponent. Would you do so if your CIA chief estimated it would afford a 10 percent chance of averting the attack?

-- Were you widowed, terminally ill and raising a young child would you rather arrange for its adoption by a loving gay couple or a heterosexual spinster? Would you rather the child grow up to be gay or mildly homophobic but happily married with kids?

-- As president will you be more concerned with protecting American lives than the lives of foreigners? If so how many Israeli lives is an American life worth? What about Kenyan lives? Palestinian lives? Iraqi lives? And how does that last affect your Iraq policy?

-- If God spoke to you, as he spoke to some in biblical accounts, and told you to convert to Catholicism, would you? What about Islam? Mormonism? Scientology? What if he asked you to get a sex change operation?

--  Were a cure for AIDS developed that required the slaughter of 15,000 live puppies per year for a key ingredient would you approve their murder?

These questions may seem, and in fact are, utterly absurd, but I am serious in suggesting that if our measure of a good question is one that makes a candidate uncomfortable, tests their performance in a pressure filled situation and forces them to think on their feet, my questions are superior to ABC's, which is another way of saying that this metric for questions is fatally flawed.

(Cross post at the American Spectator)

Depraved "art"

This is by far the most disgusting project hoax I've ever heard of.

Up and down

Everything you ever wanted to know about elevators is now collected in one magazine article, which includes one of the best arguments against high rise public housing projects I've ever read:

Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.

Terrifying if true, though I can't help but suspect that the word "apparently" was inserted by an exasperated member of the fact-checking staff.

Photo by Flickr user Annia 316 under a Creative Commons license.

If you think your boss is nuts...

... check this out.

Obama and Clinton on small towns

I've been impressed by Barack Obama in this campaign -- though his domestic agenda is far too liberal for me I've not felt put off by any of his rhetoric nearly so much as his comments about small town voters in Pennsylvania. They're a reminder that he buys into the Marxist strain of thought shared by most Democrats -- as many noted in response to What's the Matter with Kansas, it's dubious to imagine that were everyone economically secure, gun culture, religious faith and values voters would disappear from American politics.

One thing I like about Obama is his seeming ability to understand plausible arguments offered by people who disagree with him. Hillary Clinton says she's a fighter -- she'll go to Washington and fight off those nasty Republicans. Obama casts himself as someone who understands that Republicans aren't nasty people -- someone who'll aim to persuade and compromise to pass an agenda that the GOP would nevertheless ultimately disagree with.

That's why these remarks may be particularly damaging to Obama -- they call into question whether he really grasps the mindset of those whose beliefs differ from his own. Should he be elected I hope these remarks prove themselves an anomaly, or that he is at least chastened by the controversy they've generated, for there is value in someone whose views are moderated by an appreciation for the strongest objections to them.

In any case, I can't say that his blunder makes me prefer Senator Clinton as a potential POTUS, for I've no doubt that she too has elitist contempt for small town voters who like their guns and their religion. Quoth Mrs. Clinton:

"You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl,” she said.

"You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are. Not because they are bitter."

Hillary Clinton, gun culture sympathizer and afficianado. What a patronizing phony.

On Chris Matthews

The Chris Matthews profile in the New York Times Magazine is a fast-paced, entertaining, devastatingly accurate disgrace that is beneath its talented author, Mark Leibovich, who should be ashamed of himself. Readers cannot help but feel sorry for Mr. Matthews, cringing each time he brags about how many honorary degrees he's earned, or upon reading lines like, "If Matthews has an overriding professional insecurity, it is being confined to the pigeonhole of cable blowhard. The insecurity is well founded, since this is how many people view him." Reading all the scenes where the subject talks to his profiler on the phone or invites him into his house, I couldn't help but think of Janet Malcolm:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or to full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns -- when the article or book appears -- his hard lesson.

Generally I think that Janet Malcolm is wrong -- that the non-fiction profiler's craft is morally defensible insofar as it is accurate, informs the public about matters of importance and doesn't embarrass its subject more than is necessary. Sometimes that justifies writing pretty stern stuff. Two instructive examples are recent devastating profiles of Tim Russert, a colleague of Mr. Matthews at NBC.

My colleague Matthew Yglesias and Paul Waldman make overlapping points.

Here's Matt:

Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by Russert not to assess the candidate's views but to assess his or her ability to withstand the grilling. And, when this sort of toughness and sparring becomes its own reward, the vacuity of the questioning is almost guaranteed. After all, if you asked a politician a serious, important question and got a perfectly good answer, then maybe, for a moment, you couldn't be tough. Instead, Russert relies on his crutch of confronting politicians with allegedly contradictory statements they've made—to highly monotonous effect.

And Waldman:

I have a fantasy that at one of these moments, a candidate will say, "You know what, Tim, I'm not going to answer that question. This is serious business. And you, sir, are a disgrace. You have in front of you a group of accomplished, talented leaders, one of whom will in all likelihood be the next president of the United States. You can ask them whatever you want. And you choose to engage in this ridiculous gotcha game, thinking up inane questions you hope will trick us into saying something controversial or stupid. Your fondest hope is that the answer to your question will destroy someone's campaign. You're not a journalist, you're the worst kind of hack, someone whose efforts not only don't contribute to a better informed electorate, they make everyone dumber. So no, I'm not going to stand here and try to come up with the most politically safe Bible verse to cite. Is that the best you can do?"

So why do I abide that level of excoriation but feel repelled by the Chris Matthews profile? I think it's because the Tim Russert pieces are important to public discourse -- they present plausible, substantive and useful arguments for why the style of a man who presides over our presidential debates is harmful to our politics. Chris Matthews is a similarly powerful figure who holds sway over American political debate, you might say, and that's true enough. I wouldn't object to every critical piece about him.

But the NY Times Magazine piece goes to great pains to show that Matthews is arrogant, insecure, boorish -- it revels in each supporting detail -- not to make some useful point about how cable news might be better, or some other arguably useful point, but merely for the sake of an entertaining profile. I suppose one could argue that as an influential public figure it's somehow useful that we all know Mr. Matthews better, which brings me to the most damning detail of all -- at profile's end, for all the excruciating detail Mr. Matthews has suffered, I don't actually feel as though I've learned very much useful new information about him at all.

After all, who can watch even a few minutes of Chris Matthews without understanding his persona -- the rough around the edges smarts, the occasional boorishness, the ego, the insecurity, etc? Why embarrass and shame someone for the sake of revealing what's obvious to everyone already?

Born in the USA, raised in China

(cross post at the American Spectator's blog)

Patrick Keefe boards a flight to the Chinese province of Fujian, takes his seat in first class, and is astonished to discover that half his fellow passengers are... babies. So begins a Slate travel dispatch that doubles as the most astonishing immigration story I've read this year.

An excerpt:

 

The Fujianese are known for their work ethic and entrepreneurial zeal, and the new arrivals fanned across the United States and started businesses. That generic Chinese restaurant in the strip mall near your house? Almost certainly run by Fujianese. Those no-frills "Chinatown buses" that initially linked Eastern seaboard cities and now rival Greyhound, crisscrossing the continent? A Fujianese innovation.

The Fujianese in America work so hard, in fact, that when they have babies -- babies who, by virtue of being born on American soil, are U.S. citizens -- they don't have time to raise them. So, they send the babies home, back to the very villages the parents left, to be raised by their grandparents. The babies sitting around me -- who begin screaming in unison as the plane nears Fuzhou and begins its descent -- are packing something that many of their chaperones lack: U.S. passports.

As an immigration columnist who opposed illegal immigration, I always cringed most when I read about someone brought to the United States illegally as a baby, raised here, and deported at age 12 or 16 or 21 to a country they'd never known. They considered themselves American, as did everyone they knew -- their technical legal status seemed neither just, given their innocence, nor a reflection of their loyalty to our country.

The story above portends an almost opposite problem: a decade or two hence there will be adults who are Chinese in every way except the most legalistic one, but who are entitled to live, work and vote in America without going through any of the safeguards or assimilative features our immigration process (or growing up here) affords.

Americans sometimes fret about whether so-called anchor babies and illegal immigrant kids will grow up loyal to the country of their ancestry or the country of their upbringing. I find these "anchorless babies" more cause for concern.

Image by aptly named Flickr user Sinosplice.