Entries Tagged 'aside' ↓

I’m checking out for a short vacation. I may pop in if I feel like I’ve got something to say. If not, Happy Fourth!

… “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Will Saletan doesn’t think so, judging by his skeptical take on George Lakoff’s (he of the “framing” meme) new book.

First Saletan describes the contours of Lakoff’s own frame [e.a.]:

Lakoff blames “neoliberals” and their “Old Enlightenment” mentality for the Democratic Party’s weakness. They think they can win elections by citing facts and offering programs that serve voters’ interests. When they lose, they conclude that they need to move farther to the right, where the voters are.

This is all wrong, Lakoff explains. Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea. In a “New Enlightenment,” progressives will exploit these discoveries. They’ll present frames instead of raw facts. They’ll train the public to think less about self-interest and more about serving others. It’s not the platform that needs to be changed. It’s the voters.

Then he mocks Lakoff’s “arguments”: [e.a.]:

In place of neoliberalism, he offers neuroliberalism. Since voters’ opinions are neither logical nor self-made, they should be altered, not obeyed. Politicians should “not follow polls but use them to see how they can change public opinion to their moral worldview.” And since persuasion is mechanical, progressives should rely less on facts and more on images and drama, “casting progressives as heroes, and by implication, conservatives as villains.” The key is to “say things not once, but over and over. Brains change when ideas are repeatedly activated.”

What should progressives say? That conservatism is “fundamentally antidemocratic.” It “tells us to save your own skin and not to care about your neighbor,” so “conservatives don’t pay that much attention to injured veterans.” As an exemplar of conservatism, Lakoff cites the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

It’s hard to take all this seriously if you know any conservatives, just as it’s hard to take Lakoff’s neurodeterminism seriously if you know any science. As he acknowledges, current brain-imaging technology is far too crude to see specific neural activity. Cores? Narrative structures? Issue-to-worldview binding? It’s all speculation.

Lakoff’s historical claims are easier to assess. They’re demonstrably false. In his quest to explain the 21st century, he seems to have forgotten the 20th.

Now, who said the book review is dead?

The shocking sudden death of Tim Russert yesterday was etched on the faces of every media player and politico who was interviewed on television about it yesterday and into the night (see TV Newser here and here and here and here and here, etc., for complete coverage of the coverage), but the news cycle and the blogosphere move on even as media insiders mourn.

There are only a few Russert links up at Memeorandum now, and it has been less than 24 hours since media insiders were dealt the body blow of losing one of their own well-loved favorites.

Tim Russert was the very definition of the MSM … but the internet waits for no man.

“News” (compelling stories of gossip and intrigue; political attacks; literary feuds; natural disasters; and PRopaganda^TM) of events and pseudo-events cascades over us with the power of Niagara Falls.

We are shaken (by evidence of man’s—and nature’s—cruelty to man) but not easily stirred—or bestirred even to change our minds, much less to act. A conundrum, that.

If you’re like me, you’re scratching your head about this crazy economy, what with the subprime mortgage meltdown and the skyrocketing price of oil (and gasoline) and higher unemployment numbers and a seemingly endless series of bad-news items. So if you’re like me, you might have read this piece in today’s New York Times and thought: “This seems to be saying something noteworthy”—namely, that the media and now Congress are doing a lot more to sow confusion and hysterically point fingers than to act like the responsible leaders (and opinion leaders) they’re supposed to be [e.a.].

In Washington, financial speculators have fat targets on their backs.

They are being blamed for high gas prices, soaring grocery bills and volatile commodity markets, and lawmakers are lashing out at market regulators for not cracking down on them more vigorously. …

Although it is common in tough financial times to blame the speculators, this escalating hostility toward them is starting to worry people with years of knowledge about how commodity markets work. Because without speculators, they say, these markets do not work at all.

Speculators, people willing to risk their capital in search of high profits, are central to healthy commodity markets, they say, and broad-brush restrictions on them could damage markets that are already under pressure from rising global demand for food and fuel.

The issues raised in the Times piece are best summarized on an IHT blog:

Who’s to blame for high oil prices? Speculators. Who’s to blame for high food prices? Speculators again. Who’s causing havoc in financial markets? Why, the speculators, naturally. That’s the line we’re hearing all over the place these days, from food protests in the streets to OPEC press conferences. Now, politicians in Washington want to do something about those pesky speculators. But can they, without harming the markets?

As Diana Henriques reports, experts are starting to worry that speculation is being confused with manipulation of markets in the public eye. Indeed, the very use of the word “speculator” can disguise the fact that many participants in commodity markets are trying to reduce, rather than enhance, their risks. They include airlines trying to hedge their fuel costs and food suppliers trying to guarantee their supply of ingredients at a reasonable price.

And then you go to the online comments to the NYT piece and you read this and your confidence in the common sense of Americans who are not in the media or in Congress grows … and your heart swells with gratitude:

This country is overrun with whiney cry-babies. Every time there is a bump in the road, the government or some stick-their-nose-in-your-business organization wants to get out the pitch forks and torches and start yelling “it has to be somebody else’s fault.” Then come the lemmings. I’m in hell watching bad reality TV. “Excessive speculation”…can anybody remember “excessively hot McDonald’s coffee”? Somebody besides me please tell these people to shut-up and sit down.

The sportscaster who all baby boomers remember for his intoning of the great tag “the thrill of victory … the agony of defeat,” and for his heroic, gritty coverage of the catastrophic 1972 Munich Olympics, where 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists while the German authorities looked on, died last week.

The New York Times remembers:

Mr. McKay was a hype-averse optimist and poetic storyteller who left analysis and brickbats to co-workers like Dick Button, Peggy Fleming, Donna de Varona, Jackie Stewart and Bill Hartack.

Emotion occasionally slipped through objectivity. After an American athlete won a gold medal in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Mr. McKay said: “If I said I was an objective reporter, I’d be lying through my teeth. I think when an American wins, you’re excited. And why not?”

Indeed—the Olympics is all about (friendly) competition among nations, after all, and so even the NYT can forgive the likeable McKay his occasional loss of objectivity.

No matter. As Peter Alfano wrote in The New York Times during those Olympics, television allowed Mr. McKay “to play Uncle Sam for two weeks.”

But what McKay is really famous for is the storyteller’s gift, which he brought (with great relish) to ABC’s Wide World of Sports and, eventually, to the network’s Olympics coverage, with its “up close and personal” featurettes.*** McKay and his longtime boss, ABC’s legendary Roone Arledge, were in fact collaborators in creating enticing and entertaining and often exciting television.

From the NYT’s 2002 obituary of Arledge:

With Mr. McKay as host, [Wide World of Sports]  filled a latent hunger for sports in an entire generation of viewers by ‘’spanning the globe” in the phrase that Mr. Arledge and Mr. McKay came up with, to bring viewers ”the human drama of athletic competition: the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.” [e.a.]

The most interesting aspect of Arledge’s (and McKay’s) success was how they filled that “latent” hunger for sports: they adapted an ancient form of storytelling—the journey of the hero—for a new medium (television).

After describing a host of production techniques that would be brought to coverage of the [Olympics], including cameras on jeeps, hand-held cameras, boom microphones for sound, and even the use of helicopters, Mr. Arledge effectively summed up his philosophy, one that would ultimately transform television. ”In short, we are going to add show business to sports,” he said. [e.a.]

They did bring showbiz to sports—and, eventually, to the “news” too—and it worked. Most interesting of all was where Arledge got the idea: as a college student [e.a.]:

Mr. Arledge attended Columbia University, beginning in 1949, and came under the influence of some of the outstanding faculty in the English department, notably Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren.

Two of the signature touches that Mr. Arledge brought to the programs he later produced he learned in these courses: the importance of narrative and the role of the hero. Years later the announcers of ABC Sports were taught to emphasize what Mr. Arledge called the story line of whatever game they were covering and to focus on a star whose personal story could transcend the outcome of the events itself. The ‘up close and personal’ biography of an athlete, which ABC’s Olympic coverage invented to introduce viewers to obscure foreign athletes, became the template for personalizing the stories of stars in every sport.

Interesting stuff, and McKay was as instrumental as Arledge in changing the face of TV. But McKay was, more than anything, a mensch and a powerful role model.

ETP’s Rachel Sklar reports:

I had read a great and moving article about [McKay] a year and a half ago that I remembered well. It was by his son, CBS News & Sports president Sean McManus, on the back essay page of Best Life magazine. …

McManus said that there had been “probably 1,500 letters and telegrams” about [his coverage of the Munich massacre] waiting for McKay when they returned, including one from Walter Cronkite. Years later, McManus was named president of CBS News, and his father cried when he told him that Cronkite had called him “boss.”

In the essay, McManus said that his father “always told me a man had to live up to his job…I try to follow not only my dad’s words, but his example: As long as I do the job I’m asked to do, everything else will be all right.”

Jim McKay, RIP.

—————-

***Eventually this kind of soft-focus coverage of sports, meant to attract women viewers to the Olympics—a strategy that succeeded—would send real sports fans away in droves, but that’s a story for another day.

The other day, the NYT’s Kit Seelye described how slips of the candidates’ tongues play out in today’s world:

The speed at which [Clinton's RFK assassination] remarks were transmitted and reacted to illustrated the new reality candidates are grappling with in this year’s campaign, in which Mr. Obama’s own remarks about “bitter” small-town voters ricocheted around the Internet.

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were initially reported online by The New York Post, whose reporters were not traveling with the Clinton campaign but were instead watching a live video feed of the meeting with newspaper editors. Its report quickly jumped to the Drudge Report, then whipped around the Internet and on television, with outraged comments piling up on Web sites.

Campaign aides were taken aback by the quick reaction to her remarks, but then quickly realized that Mrs. Clinton had to backpedal. She then spoke to the traveling press corps for the first time in more than a week, at a supermarket here.

Yesterday, Seelye followed up andn described the devastating effect that this latest sensational pseudo-event has had on Clinton’s campaign:

The Clinton campaign began a concerted effort over the weekend to try to “set the record straight” and contain the damage from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comments Friday about Robert F. Kennedy.

In a letter to The Daily News, published Sunday, Mrs. Clinton said her remarks had been taken entirely out of context.

Her aides also said that the news media and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama were partly responsible for fanning the flames.

Seelye gave a lot of space to the dynamic of the controversy, explaining exactly how it got started and how the flames were fanned:

Shortly after Mrs. Clinton spoke on Friday, the Obama campaign jumped on the story, sending an e-mail message to reporters saying her comment had no place in a presidential campaign. It linked to a online report in The New York Post that said Mrs. Clinton was “making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama” — a phrase the newspaper later dropped.

On “Face the Nation” Sunday on CBS, Mr. Wolfson said, “It was unfortunate and unnecessary, and in my opinion, inflammatory, for the Obama campaign to attack Senator Clinton on Friday for these remarks, without obviously knowing the full facts or context.”

The Obama campaign had also e-mailed to reporters a transcript of a harsh critique of Mrs. Clinton on “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos, the host of “This Week” on ABC, asked David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s top strategist, about sending the transcript.

“You say you’re not trying to stir the issue up,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. “But a member of your press staff yesterday was sending around to an entire press list — I have the e-mail here — Keith Olbermann’s searing commentary against Hillary Clinton. So that is stirring this up, isn’t it?”

Indeed it is. The gaffe wars—aka the “distractions”—are very effective. That’s why both sides have been stirring them up, with the help of an all-too-willing press (to great effect, particularly on the Obama side).

Meanwhile: it is all dirty, stinking politics. Here’s what I mean: while his campaign was stirring the tremendous enmity among Democrats, Saint Barack the Post-Partisan was advising Wesleyan graduates to take a vow of poverty in order to gain personal “salvation” through serving the common good.

This comment, and his crowd-pleasing reference to America’s “money culture” didn’t even get picked up by the usual blogospheric suspects, much less the MSM. I guess they don’t qualify as gaffes.

Or perhaps the media is playing favorites in the gaffe wars, too. Rather than cop to that, The Politico’s John Harris writes a mea culpa about the media’s “lack of proportionality” in reporting the “gaffes”

The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days.

Who can guess what stories will cause the media machine to rev up its hype jets?

Read the whole thing.

Ann Althouse was intrigued by this post from Emily Bazelton about why women stray (which Bazelton wrote in response to a piece by Philip Weiss in New York magazine).

Althouse quotes Bazelton [e.a.]:

Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they’re easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin’ Plato’s Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women’s desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don’t hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.

Just because you don’t hear stories about such men doesn’t mean they don’t exist!
This “debate” is all just so much intellectual masturbation, not to mention an utter bore.

Whenever bad news crops up about the Kennedys, I always think of Caroline, and I wonder how she keeps going with grace and dignity, but she does.

Soon her last remaining confidant from her father’s generation—her moral support—will be gone.

Sad.

Threaten them—and that’s exactly what Barack Obama did the other day:

Democrat Barack Obama said on Sunday he would pursue a vigorous antitrust policy if he becomes U.S. president and singled out the media industry as one area where government regulators would need to be watchful as consolidation increases.

“I will assure that we will have an antitrust division that is serious about pursuing cases,” the Illinois senator told an audience of mostly senior citizens in Oregon.

“There are going to be areas, in the media for example where we’re seeing more and more consolidation, that I think (it) is legitimate to ask…is the consumer being served?”

 Matt Stoller sets up a likely scenario under an Obama administration [e.a.]:

It’s going to be really interesting to see how Obama’s administration takes on the media, and frankly, if I were a network executive, I’d be worried.  The White House and Brian Williams may find the Pentagon Pundit scandal to be nothing more than what happens on liberal blogs, but Obama is wondering if their business model is really “serving the consumer,” and what the Justice Department might have to say about that.

His commenters are appalled:

He just gave himself the Kiss of Death. Guaranteed. … But now Obama is going to make the press go nuclear on him because he just made the biggest mistake one could ever make. …

And that mistake is saying you are going breakup the media conglomerates. You just don’t do that before you are elected. Rest assured that every, and I mean every writer and columnist, and broadcaster has got their marching orders and if they still want to be employed by the very people who Obama wants to hurt they will write what the boss wants them to write, say what the boss wants them to say, and do everything in their power that the boss gets what he wants and that is the defeat of Obama.

 ————

This seems like the sort of issue where you play nice during the election and knife the big media corporations in the back once elected.

————

If I was one of those who sacrificed financially so I could give to Obama and then he pulls a bone head move like this I would certainly want my money back.

What kind of good politician pisses on the very feet of the press who has the power to, figuratively speaking, politically assassinate him?

Yeah, I kinda wonder about that, and I keep coming back to the idea that Obama is, shall we say, a little overconfident at this point, and in love with the image of himself as the progressive hero who will save America.

Meanehile, he whines about the media’s “unfair” treatment of his wife, who’s out there battling for him—and saying stupid, intelligence-insulting things—night and day.

If she chooses to speak for him—and she certainly doesn’t hold back—then she’s fair game. It’s not faaaaaiiiiiiiiir. Wah wah wah.

Clippings keep piling up around me, even though I don’t have the energy to write about them. Here’s a taste:

[China] Earthquake Opens Gap in Controls on Media

The earthquake has tested this country in many ways, including a death toll that has steadily climbed into the tens of thousands and the logistical nightmare of reaching isolated hamlets in a mountainous region with narrow, treacherous roads.

One of the biggest challenges, though, is to the country’s sometimes sophisticated, sometimes heavy-handed propaganda system. China’s censors found themselves uncharacteristically hamstrung when they tried to micromanage news coverage of the earthquake, as they do most major news stories in China.

By Wednesday, so many reporters had ignored the government’s instructions that the Propaganda Department rescinded its original order, replacing it with another, more realistic one, reflecting its temporary loss of control. “Reporters going to the disaster zone must move about with rescue teams,” it said, giving tacit, retroactive approval to freer coverage.

One reporter from The Oriental Morning Post, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because the workings of the propaganda system are often treated as state secrets, described the widespread defiance as “stepping beyond the boundaries collectively.”

That shows real bravery in the face of oppression. It’s what used to be known as speaking truth to power. It’s an encouraging sign about cultural change in China to go along with the almost unbelievable economic changes that are taking place there. Fabulous business opportunities notwithstanding, China is, after all, still a place where people who are inconvenient to the regime disappear, or are disappeared. This leaves me with a little hope that there are some Chinese who are fighting for a space for freedom of expression—and accountability to the people—in the new China.

Here’s some good news on the homefront:

Immigrants’ Children Find Better Lives, Study Shows

Anybody surprised by that? Funnily enough, yes!—a sociologist.

In 1992, Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, published an influential essay suggesting that members of the post-1965 second generation might do worse than their parents, refusing to accept low-level, poorly paying jobs and adopting negative attitudes toward school and work.

But the authors of the new study found that Professor Gans’s fears have not been realized. Most of the young people studied worked in white-collar clerical or service jobs in retail and major financial services and most had achieved “real, if modest, progress over their parents’ generation.”

So much for the predictive powers of influential essays.

Here’s a disturbing portrait of what’s roiling and seething beneath the “calm” that has overtaken Lebanon in the wake of the explosive violence of the last two weeks:

Hezbollah’s brief takeover of Beirut led to brutal counterattacks in northern Lebanon, where Sunni Muslims deeply resented the Shiite militant group’s display of power. The violence energized radical Sunni factions, including some affiliated with Al Qaeda, and extremist Sunni Web sites across the Arab world have been buzzing with calls for a jihad to avenge the wounded pride of Lebanese Sunnis.

Although the crisis eased Thursday after Arab diplomats brokered a deal to restart political talks among the factions, the questions that have crippled the government for 18 months remain unresolved. It is not yet clear that enough international consensus exists among the key powers involved in Lebanon - Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the United States - for a durable power-sharing agreement.

Meanwhile, many Lebanese agree that the hardening of Sunni-Shiite animosities - reminiscent of the Muslim-Christian fault line during the country’s 15-year civil war - is likely to make any future conflict here more violent.

“The Sunni-Shiite conflict is in the open now, it’s been triggered and operationalized,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “This is a deep wound, and it’s going to have serious repercussions if it’s not immediately and seriously addressed.”

On another note … If you’re a Dylan fan—particularly a female fan, and of a certain age—you won’t want to miss Stephanie Zacharek’s review of Suze Rotolo’s memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1960s:

Face it: The art — or is it more of a science? — of dissecting Bob Dylan is a man’s game. Most of the Dylan scholars (both the smart and the lame ones), the rock critics who have collectively spent several lifetimes wrestling with his lyrics, the civilian gasbags who hold forth at dinner parties whenever his name is even mentioned, are men. I used to have an officemate who, whenever he wanted to take a break from doing actual work (which was shockingly often), would march into my office singing some random Dylan lyric and challenge me to name which song it came from. I know women who love Dylan’s music as much as anyone else does, but I’ve never met one who felt the need to be a walking, talking sack of trivia.

The cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” shows an almost unbearably young-looking couple striding toward the camera — toward the future — through a corridor of parked cars and tallish buildings laced with fire escapes. There’s slush in the street; this is New York in midwinter, after all. The guy in the picture, a skinny, nervous-looking kid, his head topped with a tall pile of curly hair, is instantly recognizable. But the girl, attractive and thoughtful looking, with a wide-open smile, holds the camera’s gaze just as intently. Dylan fans, thanks to their stockpile of important trivia, have always known that this woman’s name is Suze Rotolo. Now we know more than just her name.

Rotolo was also featured in the New York Times last weekend.

In “A Freewheelin’ Time” Ms. Rotolo walks a delicate line between not wanting to exploit her relationship with Mr. Dylan but needing to address people’s understandable curiosity about it. “Feeding the beast” is how Ms. Rotolo describes the futility of trying to gratify the endless hunger of Dylan fanatics. “When you know that someone is human, to make them godlike is disconcerting,” she said. “I’m not a rapacious Dylan junkie.”

For his part, Dylan had shown himself not at all godlike, but rather enchanted, when he wrote about Rotolo in Chronicles, Volume One:

“She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves.”

If you’re a fan and haven’t read his memoir (”volume one”), do so immediately.

Sometimes, the obituaries make for the best reading in the paper. Case in point, today’s NYT celebrates the life and work of Will Elder, inimatable inimitable artist for Mad magazine, among others:

A dead-on caricaturist with an anarchic sense of humor, Mr. Elder stuffed the backgrounds of his Madison Avenue parodies and comic-strip spoofs with inane puns, silly signs and weird characters doing strange things.

“That approach to humor seeped into the rest of the magazine and the DNA of its contributors,” said John Ficarra, the editor of Mad. “It set the tone for the entire magazine and created a look that endures to this day.”

Mr. Elder called these background fillers “chicken fat,” explaining that they were “the part of the strip that gave it some flavor but did little to advance the story line.” This layered, free-for-all approach influenced the cartoons of R. Crumb and films like “Airplane!” and the “Naked Gun” series.

Born Wolf William Eisenberg in the Bronx, Mr. Elder attended public schools and, an unimposing physical specimen, sat on the sidelines when teams were chosen for neighborhood sports. Chalk in hand, he kept score and drew caricatures, a valuable defense against bullies. “My chalk was mightier than their sticks,” Mr. VandenBergh recalled him saying.

Also, from the “America is Mean” files—on television

“Gossip Girl,” which has its season finale on Monday, explores the unnavigability of friendship. Female bonding is punctuated by the joy and disappointments of dating, but the ruling passion is power: the pride that comes with connecting with one’s ilk and asserting control, as well as the scorching pain of rejection and ridicule. Sex is easy; it’s the cliques that take time and solicitude.

and in real life:

“Park Slope isn’t even part of Brooklyn anymore,” wrote one commenter on Gothamist. “It’s seriously a lower rung of hell, filled with hateful English teachers.” And on Eater.com, one posted comment said: “Park Slope and its ilk are why NYC is becoming more and more pathetic by the day.”

Yep: community fussbudgets, whiny parents, taverns crawling with toddlers, hip watering holes edging out old-man bars. It’s everything New Yorkers love to hate about Park Slope.

Well, not everything. Check the comments on real estate blogs like Brownstoner and Curbed, or ask around. To its detractors, Park Slope is both haunt and hatchery of New York’s smuggest limousine-liberal yuppies.

It is, if I may further summarize the bad publicity, overrated and hypocritical. Its glorious brownstone blocks and jaunty cafes are awash in carpetbagger entitlement, ruled by snarling “Stroller Nazis.” The neighborhood is a ground zero of all that is twee and lame. It is, God forbid, the suburbs.

So much to hate. So little time.

So it goes.