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In Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis—that classic essay on the origins of American republicanism—the historian pauses over a description of what happens to the pioneer when civilization catches up to him. It comes from an 1830s guide to the West. "He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits … till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he 'breaks for the high timber,' 'clears out for the New Purchase,' or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over."
This anti-social frontiersman with his elbows out is the guiding spirit of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a short-story collection by Wells Tower. Though not exactly new to the literary scene—his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Harper's—he has now published his first book, and suitably enough, it forges into the wilder regions of the American character in lucid, vernacular prose.
The title story, set during the Viking era, is simultaneously unlike anything else in the collection and the best example of what Tower is up to. The characters are, yes, marauding Vikings who attack a neighboring island without provocation. Although Harald, the narrator, feels he has outgrown the whole rape-and-pillage game, and although his wife urges him to stay home, he hops on the longboat and then watches as his compatriots go "on a real binge," hanging monks from trees.
The pathos in this story comes not from the brutality itself, but from Harald's curious detachment, which he conveys in riveting sentences. Here's his description of a grotesque ritual called the "blood eagle":
[Djarf] placed the point of his sword to one side of Naddod's spine. He leaned into it and worked the steel in gingerly, delicately crunching through one rib at a time until he'd made an incision about a foot long. …Then he knelt and put his hands into the cuts. He fumbled around in there a second, and then drew Naddod's lungs out through the slits. As Naddod huffed and gasped, the lungs flapped, looking sort of like a pair of wings. I had to turn away myself.
Tower's precise rendition of this grisly surgery—the crunch of the ribs, the image of Djarf fumbling around Naddod's innards, the lungs flapping like wings—builds to Harald's understated response, as if to a paper cut. He's the pillager-as-spectator, caught in the limbo between true callousness and true feeling, trapped—despite his longboat—in his passivity.
Marauding is a practical necessity ("Once you back down from one job, you're lucky if they'll even let you put in for a flat-fee trade escort"), and, besides, it's less "crazy-making" than domestic life, because the latter is so precarious. As Harald notes in the melancholy last paragraph, "You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. … [S]till you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home." Hearth and home, wife and children are simply not as durable as oars and steel.
The Vikings, of course, are really Americans—invading a tiny country for no apparent reason. And all the American characters in the collection are Vikings—randomly violent, tough, and dangerous to know—just on a smaller scale. They are real-estate developers, carpenters, and entrepreneur inventors, bumbling through life, alienating their spouses, relatives, and friends. Tower isn't the first writer to document the anti-social American spirit, but he's a keen observer of how the drive to break out of confinement rarely leads to true release. Like Harald, Tower's other characters—for the most part—do love their families, but they constantly find themselves striking out alone. And their missions have a way of backfiring.
Take Matthew, the narrator in "Retreat," a thrice-married real-estate developer who has "lived and profited in nine American cities" and just recently bought a small mountain in Maine. Since childhood, he's had a tense relationship with his brother, Stephen, but after six strong drinks, "our knotty history unkinks itself into a sad and simple thing. I go wet at the eyes for my brother and swell with regret at the thirty-nine years we've spent lost to each other." He invites Stephen up for a weekend hunting trip with the best intentions but antagonizes him compulsively: He's late for the airport pickup, and their reunion starts off with a fight. Back at his cabin, he pressures Stephen to spend his life savings on a real-estate venture, then storms off to bed. When Stephen tries to communicate his sense of loneliness, Matthew lets out "a long, low fart."
These cruelties are uniformly petty: just so many paper cuts. Yet the cumulative effect is excruciating for Stephen, as well as for the reader watching Matthew ruin the weekend. Not least, they are excruciating for Matthew himself, who succeeds only in walling himself off. In the final scenes, Matthew shoots a moose and feels momentarily elated. But the meat is spoiled: "[T]here was a slight pungency to it, a dark diarrheal scent gathering in the air." While Stephen laughs it off, vowing to hunt again the next day, Matthew stubbornly eats his putrid steak—a bizarre bid to deny the fruitlessness of their trip, which becomes yet another point of separation between the two brothers.
Many of Tower's protagonists are so hypermasculine they're Hemingway-esque. Yet one of his best-drawn characters is Jacey, the teenage girl in "Wild America." The title is lightly comic, setting the reader up for another story like "Retreat." What's "wild" here is not a geographic area—although much of the action takes place in a state forest. It's the catty competition between Jacey, "with a shiny chin and forehead and a figure like a pickle jar," and her cousin, Maya, "a five-foot-ten-inch mantis of legendary poise and ballet repute." Their casus belli is Leander, an unhygienic boy with no trace of his namesake's seductive warmth, whom Jacey kissed recently at the local planetarium. When the three set off together for a walk, Maya first plays the part of wingwoman, talking up Jacey's accomplishments, but soon tires of that role and starts to flirt with Leander.
Tower's portrayal of Jacey's reaction is pitch-perfect: Unable to compete with Maya, she lashes out in an agonizingly childish but still hurtful way. "[W]hy don't you just go off somewhere and fuck? I mean, there's all kinds of bushes and stuff around here for you all to fuck in. … She'll totally do it. She's a pretty big slut." All Jacey can do after her outburst is run off alone: Tension leads quickly to ferocity, then to the fantasy of isolation. Adventure thwarted, Jacey wants to "go back to the afternoon dark of her mother's house and watch TV and eat Triscuit crackers topped with cheddar cheese and a pickle coin." But she feels "Maya and Leander's eyes on her, watching her loiter on the bank like a fool" and doesn't have the guts to "let them see her heading home." She's the classic adolescent and the classic Tower character—deeply ambivalent about human bonding, she tries to break away and finds herself trapped.
Turner's pioneer is aggressive by necessity: To succeed, he acquired, in Turner's phrasing, "that coarseness and strength … that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil." Tower's characters have inherited the frontier mentality, but the wilderness they're taking on is no longer a physical space: It's other people and themselves. Their aggression is not so much willed as impelled, and while the pioneer at least creates something—a cabin, then a town—before leaving it all behind, Matthew, Jacey, and the rest only tear things down. Nor does Tower give them the solacing illusion that in this destructive process, they are claiming their freedom. It's a bleak state of affairs, alleviated for the reader—though not for pillagers themselves—by the sharp, brutal clarity of the author's prose.
In his new book, Work Hard. Be Nice., Jay Mathews claims that the Knowledge Is Power Program is the "best" program serving severely disadvantaged, minority-group students in America today. Let me begin—before I'm denounced as a traitor to the cause of educational reform—by saying that I'm inclined to agree. The improbable story of how KIPP was founded in 1994 by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two young Teach for America alumni in Houston, is thrilling and worthy reading. KIPP's mission has been akin to putting the first man on the moon: an all-out education race, requiring extraordinary, round-the-clock dedication from parents, students, and teachers alike. But the program is not the proven, replicable model for eliminating the achievement gap in the inner city that Mathews imagines, and this distinction is crucial. KIPP may be something more important: a unique chance to test, once and for all, the alluring but suspect notion that there actually is an educational panacea for social inequality. As of yet, the evidence for such a thing doesn't exist.
There have always been model school programs that work. There have even been some that have been successfully replicated in different parts of the country. But no program has shown it can work for all, or even most, disadvantaged children within a single city or neighborhood. Instead, as critics point out, such model programs tend to skim off those kids who are already better positioned (thanks to better home environments, greater natural gifts, savvier or better-educated parents, etc.) to escape the ghetto. Meanwhile, regular public schools are left with a more distilled population of struggling students. Similarly, model programs tend to attract young, talented, and adventurous teachers, who are willing or able to work long hours for low pay. (Model schools also tend to attract the most philanthropic dollars, which effectively boost per-pupil expenditures, even as such programs can still brag they use no more tax dollars than traditional public schools.) Indeed, Mathews likens KIPP to a cult "without the dues or the weird robes." But by definition, a cult is a fringe movement. To date, no one—including such mighty players as the Gates Foundation—has figured out how to take an educational cult and make it the predominant religion within any urban system.
Mathews insists that KIPP has solved this riddle. It's true that perhaps no other model program has risen so far so fast, with such consistently strong test scores. KIPP now has 66 academies in 19 states. Still, 66 academies amount to just three schools, on average, per state. Houston has far and away the highest concentration with, currently, seven middle schools, three elementary schools, and one high school. But this is in a school system with 200,000 students, nearly 80 percent of whom qualify for reduced or free lunches. At the moment, like every other model program before it, KIPP serves only a tiny fraction of disadvantaged students within any given district. And as education researcher Richard Rothstein has rightly noted, comparing students from different schools, even within the same disadvantaged neighborhoods, is very difficult to do in a rigorous, scientific way. Just because KIPP uses a lottery for admissions, for example, does not tell us anything about the self-selecting nature of the pool from which this lottery is drawn. (Rothstein's own research—here and here—has shown that KIPP students come from families that are better off, or better educated, than their regular public school or special-education counterparts.)
What is more, KIPP's approach is implicitly, but obviously, not designed to suit all students—or, for that matter, all parents or teachers. For decades, educators argued that disadvantaged children could succeed if only they received the same education as more advantaged, middle-class students. Many, if not most, of the nation's best public and private schools are decidedly progressive, with less emphasis on test scores and more on critical thinking skills, with rich arts, music, sports, and other extracurricular programs. Why shouldn't poorer children enjoy the same?
But KIPP is not the same. The program has usefully changed the debate by acknowledging the obvious: Kids who grow up poor, with no books or with functionally illiterate parents, in crime-ridden neighborhoods, with destructive peer influences and without access to basic medical care (such as glasses to help them read), need something significantly more than—and different from—kids who grow up with every economic and educational advantage on which to build. For one, the academic program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day every other Saturday.
There is a lot of rote learning and test prep, born of the program's emphasis on demonstrable results. Enrichment programs exist (one Bronx school has a remarkable orchestra) but are necessarily limited, because precious time must also be devoted to teaching social skills that middle-class students take for granted—for example, how to follow a speaker with one's eyes and nod as one takes in information. In addition, KIPP includes an extended summer school. (Research has shown that middle-class students consolidate and even improve on their educational gains during the summer months, while underprivileged students slip backward, negating their progress during the academic year.)
As a result, KIPP teachers typically work 65-hour weeks and a longer school year. Recognizing that students need more out-of-school aid to supplement their educations, the program also requires its staff to be available to students by phone after hours for homework help and moral support. For this overtime (which represents 60 percent more time in the classroom alone, on average, than in regular public schools), teachers receive just 20 percent more pay. Unsurprisingly, turnover is high. The program has relied heavily on the ever-renewing supply of very young (and thus less expensive) Teach for America alums, whose numbers, while growing, are decidedly finite. Indeed, it's unclear whether KIPP would exist were it not for TFA (and its own philanthropic investment in recruitment and training, which has not come cheap).
For example, many of KIPP's now-lauded approaches were first developed not by Levin and Feinberg but by a career public-school teacher in Houston whose methods they admired back when they were TFAers. Levin and Feinberg tried to recruit their mentor to help launch KIPP, but as a middle-aged single mother, she felt she couldn't afford to join their revolution. If KIPP's success is ever to become widespread, it's going to have to find more room for such everyday heroes, who are not less talented than eager, young TFAers but who do have lives, families, and financial needs outside their jobs.
Parents or guardians, too, must be hardy souls at KIPP. They have to sign a contract saying they agree to KIPP's exacting schedule, which serves, intentionally or not, to eliminate kids from less involved or determined families. While KIPP does have outreach efforts to broaden its applicant pool, only the most determined parents are likely to respond to such overtures and sign KIPP's demanding contract. This dedication suggests a higher value on education within these families, and thus kids better able or willing to learn. And the weakest students, not surprisingly, get disproportionately winnowed. In KIPP's schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the worst-performing kids have dropped out (or been expelled) in greater numbers in the higher grades; the result has been to inflate the schools' grade-to-grade improvement.
Such a regimen isn't for everyone, but KIPP has shown that with the right underprivileged population, it can make a significant, consistent difference—which is a lot more than most charter programs can say. (A 2006 report by the Education Department—i.e., under a Republican administration—revealed that traditional public schools significantly outperform charter programs in reading and math.) Far from finding the boot-camp atmosphere dispiriting, kids—at least, those who stay—clearly adore KIPP. This may be the program's singular accomplishment: It's made "back to basics" fun. However, even Mathews, the KIPP champion, describes an approach to discipline that sometimes seems unduly harsh; in less expert hands, such an approach could easily deteriorate into something more disturbing, and if implemented on a wide scale, might well turn off as many students and parents as it helps. Finally, even with such gargantuan efforts, KIPP helps to close, but does not remotely eliminate, the achievement gap in the inner city. It is not the answer to urban ills that Mathews proposes.
But because KIPP has done so much better than so many other charter programs, it has earned the right to shoot not only for the moon but beyond. Given this, what mystifies me about KIPP is that it has scattered its resources across the country—opening just a few schools in any one state—instead of trying to concentrate its resources more fully in one community.
No doubt the strategy partly reflects practical hurdles. States may limit the number of charter programs (although this may change if President Obama gets his way with his new education plan). In addition, there may be union or administrative opposition, although until recently, KIPP and the teachers unions had peacefully coexisted. (Now, a dispute between one KIPP school in Brooklyn and New York's United Federation of Teachers threatens this détente.)
But since the biggest debate about KIPP, on both the ideological left and right, is whether or not its methods can work for all disadvantaged children (instead of just a handful of self-selecting families), why wouldn't it—and its financial, ideological, and media backers—have a strong interest in answering this question once and for all by taking on an entire urban area or even, for that matter, a single neighborhood as, say, Geoffrey Canada has tried to do in Harlem with his Harlem's Children's Zone?
There's something perversely evasive about KIPP's opening up just one school in Dallas, one school in Albany, N.Y., one school in Oakland, Calif., one school in Charlotte, N.C., one school in Nashville, Tenn., and so on—as if the program recognizes that its best chance at success is to be the exception rather than the rule in any city where it operates. Perhaps this approach made sense in the program's early years, when it needed to build credibility and attract financing. But now it has done both. Until KIPP tries to succeed within an entire, single community, it is, for all its remarkable rise and deserved praise, just another model program that has yet to prove it can succeed with all—or even most—disadvantaged children.
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It's big picture day in Washington as the administration prepares plans to overhaul both the financial regulation system and the war in Afghanistan. A campaign juggernaut fires up its engines to defend President Obama's budget as he shifts his attention to two crucial summits next week. Obama scores a 45 on the Change-o-Meter.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced today that Obama will press for increased regulation of the global financial system when he travels to London next week for the G20 summit. Setting a good example at home, the administration announced an ambitious proposal to ratchet up oversight of domestic financial institutions, including hedge funds and insurers like AIG, in hopes of erecting better levees against future economic maelstroms. The 'Meter approves, if only out of self-interest in not making stratospheric bailouts a once-a-decade thing: 25 points.
Speaking of huge, intractable problems, a plan for Afghanistan—details of which will emerge soon—would have the United States take "unabashed ownership" of the war effort there, as the Washington Post put it today. The plan includes a major increase in American civilian officials and shifting responsibilities for American allies, many of whom are drawing down their commitment of combat troops in the region. The 'Meter is mostly just pleased that there's a coherent plan for the eight-year-old war effort and awards 15 points for that fact as details continue to emerge. Expect to hear much more as Obama heads to a NATO summit after the G20 meeting.
Meanwhile, the gargantuan organization of supporters—and, more important, their 13 million e-mail addresses—that the Obama organization compiled during the campaign is being reconjured on behalf of Obama's budget proposal. While there is some fear that this Obamamaniac hydra could end up bullying through his agenda with a massive write-your-congressman campaign, for now the 'Meter is heartened to learn that 13 million people are aware that there's a budget bill in the first place and awards five points—which it will retract the moment an overeager Obama volunteer calls its cell phone.
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President Obama faced tough questions on his new budget and economic-recovery plans during a nationally televised press conference last night and woke up today to criticism from the European Union and Mexico. But the public still loves him, and Wall Street's sustained rally is alleviating a little of the doom and gloom. The good and the bad almost cancel each other out, giving Obama a paltry 5 points on the Change-o-meter today.
During Obama's second major prime-time news conference, reporters pressed the president about his first budget plan and his solutions to economic woes plaguing the country. Reporters asked no questions about Iraq or Afghanistan, focusing almost exclusively on the economy. The event felt particularly somber compared with Obama's spate of more lighthearted appearances over the last week, presenting his NCAA bracket on ESPN and chatting with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Some have accused Obama of wasting his time with trivial matters to appeal to the American public (which still views him favorably and seems to like his many appearances), overexposing himself, and not focusing on the problems at hand. Either way, Obama's media (over)exposure represents a change from the last couple of administrations—he's already had half as many prime-time press conferences as both Bush and Clinton did in their entire eight-year tenures—even if he isn't saying anything surprising. The 'Meter awards 10 points for style and immediately subtracts five for lack of substance, for a total of five points.
Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, the current president of the European Union, called Obama's plan to stimulate spending as a way out of the recession a "road to hell." The harsh rhetoric is the toughest so far from a European leader, many of whom have reservations about the U.S. plan for economic recovery. The 'Meter doesn't lose too much sleep fretting over the approval of all 27 EU nations but still deducts five points for this distraction.
Spirits are up, however, on Wall Street, with stocks continuing to rally after news that home sales rose in February, the first increase in seven months. Orders for major manufactured goods were up last month as well. While it's obscenely early to declare a ratification of Obama's policies, hope in the markets unquestionably boosts his political capital. The 'Meter awards 10 points.
To the south, Mexico's economic problems, plus rampant drug violence fueled by American weapons and America's drug appetite, are straining its relations with the United States. Obama said earlier this month that he would consider deploying the National Guard to parts of the border to contain drug-related violence on the U.S. side and promised a plan "within a few months." Now it looks as if the decision can't wait. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Mexico today, and Obama plans to visit in April, but the 'Meter docks the administration five points for not taking more aggressive measures to shore up relations with Mexico. As if the administration needed another problem to deal with.
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It's another day of only-in-Washington trash talking. Rep. Barney Frank calls Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a homophobe. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez calls President Obama ignorant. And a couple of Republicans are calling for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's ouster. But all the bullying aside, it's a good day for the White House. In light of some major AIG execs giving back their bonuses, the markets surging, and a promising move on climate-change policy, Obama and his cohorts earn a 40 on the Change-o-Meter today.
New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced last night that he has already cajoled 18 of the top 25 AIG executives into giving back their bonuses, a not-so-random act of kindness adding up to $50 million so far. Cuomo presented the execs with a simple choice: return the bonus checks or have their names released to the angry mob with pitchforks on the sidewalk outside. The news is good for everyone: Congress is putting a hold on the highly reactionary bonus-busting legislation drafted last week, and the public will keep the money it meant to spend on tar and feathers. From the 'Meter's standpoint, Obama wins points for managing to keep his hands clean. It awards 15 points for a reasonably tidy solution to the AIG mess—for today, anyway.
Despite early rumblings from the peanut gallery, markets rallied yesterday at the announcement of the Treasury Department's plan to buy up banks' toxic assets, with the Dow soaring 6.8 percent to its highest level in months. At a time when whispered words like resignation are whistling through Geithner's office, this marked show of confidence on the trading floor should cheer Obama, who was asked on Sunday whether he might consider getting himself a new treasury secretary. Fifteen points for signs of renewed confidence after a solid week of dubious glances toward the Treasury.
Finally, the new leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency is pressing the White House to decide how to regulate greenhouse gases, a decision that the Bush administration craftily avoided when the Supreme Court asked for it in 2007. Obama has stated pretty explicitly that he hopes to cap greenhouse-gas emissions, despite warnings from critics that the effect of such regulation could be politically treacherous. The proposal from the EPA is just the first of many steps in the process to limit emissions, but the 'Meter awards 10 points for the long-overdue action.
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President Obama announces a plan to rescue toxic bank assets, but not in a way that will get America's mind off all that AIG business. His sense of responsibility for the war in Afghanistan rescues him for a 15 on the Change-o-Meter.
This morning, embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced the details of the Obama administration's bank-asset rescue plan. Bloggers and politicos haven't quite caught up with criticism yet (hey, it's Monday), but that doesn't mean the administration is home-free. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has already gone for the jugular, likening the plan to the "cash for trash" policy that the Bush administration gave up on six months ago. Krugman blasts the Obama administration for taking the easy way out and artificially driving up the price of toxic bank assets with "financial hocus-pocus" instead of merely guaranteeing bank debts. Ouch. Others are sure to follow. It's never a good sign for your multibillion-dollar bank-rescue plan when the economist-prince of the Times op-ed page is at the front of the pundit pack. Add 10 for trying, but subtract five for ensuing poor reviews.
What's more (speaking of public opinion), the timing of the plan's announcement was far from optimal: It comes after a week during which, as E.J. Dionne notes, the Obama team refused to stay on message about the AIG bonuses. Chief economic adviser Larry Summers had said the administration can't govern out of anger, but then Obama said in so many words that it very well could, giving Geithner marching orders to "use that leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses." Today, Obama and his aides are wary of Congress' proposal to tax the AIG bonuses to Timbuktu.
Obama risks political capital with every further step to salvage banks that made poor choices as the housing bubble grew. This is no time to feed the "rewarding Wall Street" narrative that ruffled so many feathers last week, especially when the president's got big plans for health care and education. (See the Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg on the psychology of ignoring the important stuff.) Still, the 'Meter docks five; with confidence so vital to economic recovery, a clear message from the White House is essential.
Does this mean the 'Meter is a big goose egg? Hardly. Yesterday on 60 Minutes, Obama spoke two words that have spent the last eight years exiled from the president's vocabulary: "exit strategy." Just more than a month after announcing a buildup of 17,000 troops in Afghanistan, Obama said that the United States and NATO must look for a way out of the war in Afghanistan because "there's got to be a sense that this is not perpetual drift." For remembering that troops can come out of battle as well as go in, Obama gets 15 points.
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The Latin Mass is long gone, the Metropolitan Opera beams subtitles from seat backs, and Wikipedia is depopulating library stacks. Now even al-Qaida is cutting corners and dumbing down.
The evidence is A Course in the Art of Recruitment, a document that started appearing on jihadi Web sites this past summer. Its provenance is uncertain, but The Art of Recruitment is making its way through al-Qaida's distribution network, and its author's nom de guerre is Abu-Amr al-Qaidi. (Al-Qaidi means "of al-Qaida.") Writing in the CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Brian Fishman and Abdullah Warius describe the 51-page manual as a tool "designed to provide less-skilled jihadist recruiters operating independently of any cohesive terrorist organization the tools to effectively recruit secular and moderate Muslims into the global jihadist movement." It's Terrorism for Dummies.
The Art of Recruitment is hardly the first al-Qaida training manual to surface, but it represents something of a breakthrough in the terror group's ability to provide simple and practical advice to its far-flung franchisees. As such, it's a useful window on the considerable (and, to some extent, reassuring) difficulties involved in persuading somebody to become a terrorist. "The book is so basic," observed NPR's Dina Temple-Raston in a March 23 report, that "it seems to suggest al-Qaida is getting desperate for new members." Less reassuringly, The Art of Recruitment provides what may prove handy tips for less-experienced terror groups to steer around these difficulties. These include:
What sort of person is al-Qaida looking for?
Abu-Amr declares his "favorite group" to be the nonreligious, in part because they lack a vocabulary to answer religious arguments ("It is you who is right") and in part because they lack the sort of fanatical reputation that attracts anxious attention from the police. Religious newbies are also good because their views are unformed and their acquaintanceships probably in flux. Those long committed to religion are OK, so long as they aren't hotheads, cowards, gossips, misers ("money is the backbone of jihad"), or introverts (because—I have no idea where Abu-Amr gets this from—they're wishy-washy and uncomfortable with nonconformity). Converts from alternative forms of radicalism tend to be malcontents and therefore far more trouble than they're worth. "Youth in remote areas" are likely to be "naturally religious"—avoid them if they aren't—and "easy to shape and convince," because they're hicks. Colleges offer fabulous recruitment opportunities, but for that reason they're crawling with spies. People with "deviant ideas" (example: "human rights activists") can work out provided that they "listen to other opinions and show a readiness for dialogue and persuasion." The group Abu-Amr seems most wary of, oddly, is Sunni fundamentalists, partly because they think they know everything and partly because they might be spies. For the same reasons, Abu-Amr tends not to trust potential recruits who know the Quran by heart.
Even in its dumbed-down form, I'm pleased to report, becoming a terrorist would appear to require an extremely daunting quantity of reading. Dozens of vitally important texts are mentioned in the manual, and though The Art of Recruitment streamlines the reading list by identifying in many instances the most crucial passages, it nonetheless seems to me that you don't get to strap on an explosive device and enter paradise until you've completed the equivalent of a graduate seminar in jihadi studies. (None of the readings identified as most crucial is from the Quran.) Terrorism is not, nor ever will be, suitable work for dilettantes.
Note: I do not speak Arabic. Thanks to Brian Fishman of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center for providing an English translation.
In the March 24 "Green Lantern" about microwaves and ovens, Nina Shen Rastogi did not provide a clear explanation of why gas ovens might be preferable to electric ovens from an efficiency standpoint. There are significant energy losses associated with generating electricity and transmitting it to your home.
In the March 24 "Today's Papers," Daniel Politi attributed a quote from a spokeswoman for the American Nurses Association to the head of that organization.
In the March 23 "Technology," Farhad Manjoo stated that Facebook's new activity stream forces people to listen to conversations from everyone in their network. You can filter your stream according to groups of friends.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story, please send an e-mail to corrections@slate.com, and we will investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray," our reader discussion forum.
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In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Paul Rudd and Jason Segel's bromance in the new movie I Love You, Man; the implications of the Obamas' vegetable garden; and the off-the-record media listserv JournoList. And as a bonus, Stephen Metcalf interviews David Grann, the author of The Lost City of Z, after the show.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned:
The official Web site for the movie I Love You, Man.
Dana Stevens' Slate review of I Love You, Man (where you can also find the Spoiler Special podcast on the movie).
Leslie Fiedler's classic Love and Death in the American Novel, which examines male friendship in American literature.
The New York Times piece on the Obamas' vegetable garden (see map).
Andrew Martin's NYT article about the state of the sustainable food movement.
Mark Bittman's NYT article about the false belief that organic equals healthy.
Michael Calderone's article about JournoList on Politico.com.
Reihan Salam's response to the Politico article on the Atlantic's Web site.
Slate's Mickey Kaus blog entries about the JournoList dust-up.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: the remarkable work of YouTube Bollywood translation artist Buffalax.
Julia's pick: David Byrne and Brian Eno's album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
Stephen's pick: Henri-alban Alain-Fournier's Le Grande Meaulnes.
You can e-mail us, and send us your thoughts on how to pronounce the name of Alain-Fournier's book, at culturefest@slate.com.
Posted on March 25 by Jacob Ganz at 11:26 a.m.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 29 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audio book, here. (Audiobook of the week: Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.)
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the new movie version of the classic graphic novel Watchmen; Elaine Showalter's new book on the canon of female American writers, A Jury of Her Peers; and a 'tween-style makeover for kiddie cartoon hero Dora the Explorer.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
Dana Stevens' Watchmen review.
"What if Woody Allen Had Directed Watchmen?"—a slide show on Slate.
Katha Pollitt's Slate review of A Jury of Her Peers.
Laura Miller's Salon review of A Jury of Her Peers.
Katie Roiphe's New York Times review of A Jury of Her Peers.
A Washingtonpost.com piece about Dora the Explorer's makeover.
Brendan I. Koerner's Slate column about Dora's rise to power.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home.
Julia's pick: David Segal's segment of the "My Big Break" episode of This American Life.
Stephen's picks: For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver (however you pronounce it) and The Queen Is Dead by the Smiths.
You can e-mail us at culturefest@slate.com.
Posted on March 11 by Jacob Ganz at 12:39 p.m.
Feb. 25, 2009
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 28 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audio book, here. (Audio book of the week: Steve Martin's Born Standing Up.)
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the Oscars, the rant of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, the adventures of Octomom, and the Tropicana juice carton revolt.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
Dana Stevens and Slate TV critic Troy Patterson's discussion of the Oscars.
Julia Turner and Amanda Fortini's discussion of Oscar fashions.
Ron Rosenbaum's Slate piece on The Reader.
Rick Santelli's CNBC rant.
John Dickerson's Slate piece on Santelli's rant and the White House response to it.
A New York Times piece on the Tropicana packaging retraction.
The (possibly fake) Pepsi Co. branding memo unearthed by Gawker.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: Ricky Gervais' podcast.
Julia's pick: A tolerable romantic comedy: Definitely, Maybe.
Stephen's pick: The Danny Boyle film Shallow Grave.
You can e-mail us at culturefest@slate.com.
Posted on Feb. 25 at 1:28 p.m. by Julia Turner.
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudie,
When I was 17, I got pregnant. My family was not supportive, and I did not want to raise a child on my own. I placed her for adoption but never forgot about her. Twenty-three years later, I got in touch with the lawyer who assisted with the adoption and shortly after got a phone call from my long-lost daughter. We talked for a while, then e-mailed a lot. The more contact we had, the more I didn't like her. She seemed very immature and bratty—she still lives with her parents and had a child last year, whom her parents are raising. Several months later, we met. Also at the meeting were her mom, her baby, my mom, and my daughter, who is five years younger then she. This girl is rude and disrespectful to her mom, yells at her baby, dresses like a slob, and was a brat the whole weekend. My mom said this is the way she was raised, and we should be tolerant. I am all for tolerance, but this kid is awful. Still, for her birthday I sent her a great gift. I called and asked if she received it, and her response was, "Yeah, it was nice." I had put a lot of thought, time, and money into this gift, and that's all I get. I feel nothing for this girl, even though I know she is my daughter. This makes me feel guilty. How could a mother not love her own child, even if she didn't raise her? She is in school to join my chosen profession, which I think she will suck at.
—What Should I Do About the Daughter I Never Wanted?
Dear What,
It's sometimes easy when smacked in the face with issues such as abandonment, disappointment, loss, love, obligation, and guilt to focus on something more manageable. Something like, OK, so 23 years ago, I did decide I couldn't raise you. But now I've gone to the trouble of getting you a really nice birthday gift, and you're not thanking me properly, you little brat! I accept that this girl is obnoxious and immature—but maybe this isn't just a matter of nurture, but also of nature, because you are exhibiting those same qualities yourself. You must know that in regard to you, she has some big issues of her own. Surely she can detect how much you dislike her, which might set her to thinking, Hey, "Mom," the more time I spend with you, the happier I am that I was adopted. And how nice that five years after I was born, you decided to keep your next daughter—I guess you think she turned out better than me. Yes, she is your biological offspring, but her mother is the person who raised her—perhaps not very well—and who is there for her and for her child now. How disruptive of you to appear in this young woman's life and be so judgmental about how she isn't meeting your needs and expectations. For the future, a marginal relationship between the two of you is probably for the best. Or possibly you could learn to put aside your disdain and become a supportive, if peripheral, presence—someone who can give her guidance as she tries to make her way into your profession and help her so she doesn't "suck" at it.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: Insulting Wedding Gift
Dear Prudence,
Two years ago, my husband died in an accident. I was 27 years old and moved in with my mother and stepfather so I wouldn't have to be alone. (My father died years ago from lung cancer.) Then, six months ago, I got another shock when my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer that had metastasized to her brain. We've been told she has three to six months to live. Mom is totally incapacitated. It takes a lot of time and muscle to provide for her care, even though we have hospice assistance. My stepdad is the primary caretaker during the weekdays while I am at work. When I get home, I take over this role. My sister and her husband come over and relieve us on Saturdays. The problem is that my brother refuses to help with our mom. My sister and I have asked him to come over on Sunday morning and stay until Monday morning, but all he does is give us excuses. When he does come over to the house, he does not help with lifting, cleaning, or feeding her, but just visits and chats with Mom. I'm so stressed about this that when I confront him, I either cry or blow up. How do I demand that he help out with Mom and share some of this responsibility?
—Who's Going To Die on Me Next?
Dear Who's,
Your brother may not be doing enough, but you may be doing too much. You will always be glad you were there to ease her last days, but you need to reach out and see if all of you can get more relief from the physical necessities of caring for your mother. Talk to the hospice caseworker about the possibility of more nursing help. You're overwhelmed and grief-stricken, but you may be taking out on your brother some of the pain you're feeling about all you've been through. It's understandable that you resent that your brother seems to be floating through your mother's illness, not even doing any of the literal heavy lifting. But consider that your brother is also suffering because of your mother's coming death from the same terrible disease that took your father. Not everyone can bring themselves to bathe or feed a dying parent. His simply sitting and visiting with her is surely a balm for both of them. Instead of being angry at what your brother's not doing, ask him for help with things he easily can do: pick up prescriptions, shop, handle paperwork. Your mother's life is closing painfully and too soon. But she must have lived a wonderful one to have her family be so devoted to her. Keep in mind how it would hurt her to know her death drove a wedge between the people she loves the most.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
I am the flip-side of your letter last week from Bliss in Exile. Many years ago, when I was in high school, I did something very cruel to a friend of mine: I took her boyfriend. Now we are both married to other men. I found her on Facebook and attempted to contact her to apologize for the cruel thing I had done. She took your advice and hit "ignore." I feel terrible that I was not even given the opportunity to admit to her that what I did was wrong and try to make amends. I also feel a little angry because I think it is immature to hold a grudge or resentment for so long over something that a teenager once did to you. Now that I have been ignored by the person I would like to apologize to, should I just let it go? Or should I take another avenue to try to contact her to tell her how sorry I am?
—Blocked
Dear Blocked,
In response to Bliss in Exile, I have heard from several people who were the miscreants in high school and have successfully used Facebook to contact their victims and make amends. But the problem with simply making a friend request to someone you've hurt is that the person on the other end has no idea about your intentions. In cases such as yours, it's a better idea to use your Facebook network to get an address for your former classmate and write a letter explaining that what you did has weighed on you all these years, you are asking for forgiveness, and that you want to reconnect. Give your phone number and e-mail address and add you'd also be happy to be contacted through Facebook. If you don't hear anything, just be glad you did the right thing now, and accept that there are some people for whom high-school graduation was one of the happiest days of their lives.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
Over the years, I have been asked to contribute funds to some rather dodgy "causes" at work. Usually, I have been able to say no in a nice way. Last night, my husband came home with a flier produced by a co-worker in which he asks for donations so he can go climb Mount Everest! This man and my husband do not see each other outside work and have no special bond; they don't even eat lunch together. The flier closed with the request to "keep this between us." I consider asking folks at work to buy Girl Scout cookies as the absolute maximum level of acceptable hitting-up. My outrage was compounded when my husband declared his intention to give the climber $100 because, "He's a good guy, and I have to work with him and feel obligated." After my fit, he agreed to reduce the amount to $50 but got mad at me for being mad. There is still tension in the air. Am I cruel and selfish, or is my husband losing it?
—Still Steaming
Dear Still,
Your husband's colleague must have set up a PayPal account for contributions toward his honeymoon, and he found he liked having other people pick up the tab for his adventures. His request is ridiculous, and your husband should simply ignore it. If the co-worker asks directly, your husband should say, "Have a great trip, but it's not something I'm in a position to help you with." But your problem now is not your husband's relationship with the would-be Sir Edmund Hillary; it's his relationship with you. You're mad because you think he's letting himself be manipulated. By your own admission, you lost it while trying to force him to agree with you—causing your husband to feel doubly manipulated. So if he wants to cough up $50 to keep the peace with a colleague, consider that a small price to pay for your own lesson in the detriment of overreacting and the benefit of letting things go.
—Prudie
The Los Angeles District Attorney's office has convened a grand jury to probe the 1985 disappearance of John and Linda Sohus, who once rented property to Clark Rockefeller. Two handwriting experts said on Wednesday that they'd been subpoenaed to weigh in on the authenticity of a postcard, purportedly mailed from France by Linda Sohus after she vanished. What do forensic handwriting experts look at when trying to match a disputed document?
Twenty-one distinguishing characteristics. According to one standard textbook, that's the number of handwriting elements that may reliably help distinguish a person's writing. These include the dimensions and proportions of the letters, the spacing both between and within words, and the way in which words and letters are connected. (In the cursive word cat, for example, does the pen line go all the way around the circular part of the a before doubling back to complete the loop?)
The first step in a handwriting examination is to collect "known" documents—that is, writing samples definitively penned by the person in question. Next, the examiner determines how suitable that material is as a base-line specimen. Is there enough of it? Does it show a natural range of variability? Was the writer disguising her handwriting at any point or trying to simulate someone else's? (A naturally written line will show wide variation in thickness because people tend to change speed as they write. A person trying to alter her handwriting, on the other hand, will tend to write more slowly, resulting in a more even line.) These characteristics are all taken into consideration during the following step, when the examiner compares the "known" documents with the disputed one, element by element—sometimes with the help of a software program. There's no standard level of correspondence that must be reached for a document to be declared a match or nonmatch—each individual examiner makes the call, using his best judgment.
According to the handful of studies on the subject, a trained examiner will be correct more often than a layman. One 1997 study asked both professionals and amateurs to examine 144 pairs of documents and determine whether the documents in each pair were written by the same person. Both groups were as likely to answer correctly when the documents were, in fact, a match; however, amateurs were six times more likely to declare a positive match when none existed. Nevertheless, forensic handwriting analysis is not always accepted in the American judicial system. Individual judges have the authority to decide whether the conclusions of a handwriting examination are admissible as expert opinion testimony and whether the legal team's chosen examiner is a credible expert witness.
Bonus explainer: How do you become a forensic handwriting expert? Most document examiners learn their craft through two- to four-year apprenticeships, either with government organizations such as the FBI or CIA or with private practitioners. Those apprenticeships usually involve reading the classic texts of the field, writing essays, and courtroom training, in addition to practical lab experience. Oklahoma State University offers a stand-alone program in document examination, and many forensics programs offer individual courses.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Robert Baier, Ron Morris of Ronald N. Morris and Associates Inc., and Gerald B. Richards of Oklahoma State University.
A federal judge denied Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's request to take over California's prison health care system, which has been out of the state government's hands since 2006. What's the health care like in prison, anyway?
It depends on the state. At best, it's about as good as a low-income health plan. At worst, it's almost nonexistent. In general, when a prisoner gets sick, he tells the on-duty guard. If it's not urgent—a sore throat, say, or an ear infection—the guard will put his name on a list, and an appointment with the prison's in-house doctor may be set up for as soon as the next day. To handle emergencies, most prisons have a nurse on duty 24 hours a day. The majority of ailments are treated on-site, but inmates who are gravely ill can be taken to the nearest hospital. Sick prisoners must make a nominal co-payment for each visit to the jailhouse doctor—usually $5 or so, taken from an hourly wage that typically runs between 19 cents and 40 cents an hour. Costs above that are covered by the state.
Prisoners get checkups, too, but probably not as often as most people. Incoming inmates always get a physical, blood test and all, to check for diseases or drugs. (There are horror stories about new arrivals dying from withdrawal.) After that, the period between checkups varies. In Pennsylvania, men under 40 are supposed to get physicals every three years, complete with rectal exam, vision screening, and a risk assessment for chronic diseases. Women get pap and pelvic exams every year. Inmates of both genders older than 60 get a yearly electrocardiogram.
At least that's the theory. In practice, many prison systems are so overcrowded that prisoners have to wait days to see a doctor, even in emergency situations. The California penal system, for example, has 170,000 inmates in 33 jails. To make things worse, insurance companies sometimes fail to provide medication and treatment to needy prisoners, and inmate medical records get misplaced regularly. (Read the New York Times' investigative series on insurance giant Prison Health Systems here.) The quality of care also depends on the kind of prison facility. In maximum security prisons, an inmate may be taken to see the doctor in arm and leg chains, and left to wait in a cage. Those who are elderly or chronically ill might qualify for a special treatment facility—like Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands, where inmates receive constant care.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Susan Bensinger of Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and William DiMascio of the Pennsylvania Prison Society.
The Office of Management and Budget last week rejected Gov. Mark Sanford's request to pay down South Carolina's debt using $700 million of stimulus funds. But can't Sanford just ignore the OMB? What's really stopping governors from spending stimulus money however they see fit?
Politics and the law. The vast majority of the $800 billion doled out in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has strings attached. Some of it must be spent on one-time expenses like extending unemployment insurance, and some must be siphoned into pre-existing government programs like Medicaid or food stamps or highway projects. Each of these programs is supervised by a federal agency. For example, the Department of Transportation manages spending for light-rail projects, and the OMB makes sure that money is being spent as intended. If a governor were to take money earmarked for, say, school lunches and use it to pay down the state debt, the USDA, which oversees the National School Lunch Program, would send the governor a warning or, if necessary, take legal action.
More likely, interest groups would shout loud enough to keep the governor in check. For just about every government program, there's an outside group that monitors spending and performance. For example, the National Education Association would complain if secondary education were getting short shrift, while the American Society of Highway Engineers would protest if the governor chopped promised freeway projects. In other words, it would be hard for a governor to redirect money without interested observers making lots of noise—and campaigning against him in the next election.
Governors may still be able to use accounting tricks to redirect funds. Say a state usually spends $100 million on highway construction. The governor could always use the stimulus money to cover that cost and then send the state revenue intended for highways elsewhere. The effect is the same as siphoning off government funds. To prevent this, most provisions in the stimulus bill have a "maintenance of effort" requirement that says states have to keep up their usual spending to qualify for additional federal funds. In other cases, stimulus money has matching requirements. For example, to receive money to create electronic health records, a state needs to contribute "an amount equal to not less than $1 for each $5 of Federal funds provided under the grant." (Read the whole bill here.)
There's some wiggle room with "fiscal stabilization" funds, set aside to help states make up for budget shortfalls. (Forty-nine states are constitutionally required to balance their budgets.) Because every state's budget is different, the money isn't specifically earmarked. Yet the OMB still needs to approve how the funds are spent. The agency plans to keep tabs, too: Cash from the stimulus bill will be tracked separately from other government funds.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, Michael Ettlinger of the Center for American Progress, and Robert Lynch of Washington College.
Regular screening for prostate cancer may have little effect on cancer mortality, according to a pair of clinical studies published last week. The studies have reignited a years-old controversy over whether screening is worthwhile. If a simple blood test can reduce your risk of dying from prostate cancer, why wouldn't you take it?
Because prostate cancer probably won't kill you, and the treatment is risky and unpleasant. Prostate cancer is extraordinarily common, even among men who never realize they have the disease. Autopsy studies find evidence of the condition in 27 percent of men over 50 and 63 percent of men over 80, yet the great majority of those people die from some other cause. Among men diagnosed with prostate cancer—a small number compared with the undiagnosed cases—the five-year survival rate is almost 99 percent. Many of these patients live for 30 years or more before dying of some other cause.
That's not to say that prostate cancer is completely benign. It kills about three men out of 10,000 per year, and aggressive forms spread to the bone, often leading to a very painful death. The problem is that there's no way to distinguish the unlucky patients from the many who would never even notice their prostate cancer, meaning that the vast majority of treatment is unnecessary.
Treatment for the condition can be quite dangerous in its own right. The least invasive option uses a drug to block the activity of testosterone, which might otherwise accelerate the growth of the cancer. Side effects include testicular shrinkage, feminization (hot flashes and enlarged breasts), and osteoporosis. Radiation therapy or brachytherapy can cause damage to adjacent tissue, such as the colon and rectum, which sometimes doesn't manifest until years after treatment ends. Surgery to remove the prostate can sever the nerve that enables men to have erections or can lead to urinary incontinence. Because of these risks, and the low mortality rate associated with prostate cancer, many have argued that it isn't worth it to test for the disease, even though the screening process involves little more than a low-risk blood test and the eminently safe (but anxiety-inducing) digital rectal exam. Physicians note that most patients, frightened by the idea of cancer, will elect for extreme and often ill-advised treatment.
The data reported last week are unlikely to quell the debate. The U.S. study, which showed no reduction in mortality as a result of screening, did not analyze a large number of prostate-cancer deaths, and there were some potential flaws in its design. For example, 52 percent of the people in the "control group" ended up being screened for cancer. The European study involved several different testing centers with divergent protocols. Moreover, because neither study exceeded 10 years in duration, the full benefits of the screening may not yet have materialized. Meanwhile, screening advocates note that deaths from prostate cancer in the general population have been declining by 4 percent per year since 1994, which coincides rather neatly with the FDA approval of the blood screening test.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Robert Faust of the University of Maryland Medical Center, Patricia Hoge of the American Cancer Society, and Jyoti Mathad and W.T. Oberle of Mercy Medical Center.
Apprehension, with an enduring edge to it. That's the general mood among the twentysomethings I've heard from during the last several weeks in response to a question I asked about how the recession is making them feel. The fear isn't just about the present but about the long-term future. Octopuslike, it has many tentacles. But the most strangling aspect, I think, is the perception of my Gen Y e-mailers that they dutifully set up their lives based on assumptions that suddenly no longer apply. They're anxious because they can't tell what the new rules of the game will be—or because they think they can tell, and they don't like what they see coming at them.
"Forgive the inelegant analogy, but it's like I got on the train I was supposed to and dozed off for a bit and now that I've come to I have no idea where the hades we are and I do not recognize any of these stops," writes a woman, who didn't want to give her name (let's call her Shala), who is from Michigan and lives in Brooklyn. She's actually employed—she graduated from college in 2007 and got a low-paying job for a nonprofit that does digital services for libraries and museums. She says:
It's looking ahead that is the grim part. I was prepared to worry about choosing a home in a subdivision or the city, how I would invest for retirement and travel, how my siblings and I would split our parents' properties when they retire or pass away. But now I do not know if I will have much choice about where I live, retirement seems as far away and unreal as my own mortality, and I don't even know how solvent my parents are—I just hope they can live out their days without going into (much) debt.
Debt rings like a series of deadening thuds through the e-mails I received and the follow-up conversations I've had. "For my generation … it seems like the 'real world' threw up all over us," writes Jennifer, who is 22 and graduated from Boston University in May. She's living in Washington, D.C., splitting a bedroom with another recent graduate she found on Craigslist.org, and sleeping on an air mattress. Her college tuition was $44,000 a year, and even with a lot of financial aid, she graduated with $22,000 in debt.
If I were a touch more paranoid, I would think there has been a conspiracy to systematically entrap me and my fellow graduates into an endless cycle of debt. Student loans, buying necessities on credit because the student loan payments bludgeoned my bank account, racking up greater credit card debt than student loan debt, credit scores, having children, taking out another round of loans to pay for their education, wondering if retirement is possible when Social Security is a joke.
After seven months of looking for work, plus an internship, Jennifer found a job with a campaign in Northern Virginia, for $2,250 a month. It's not enough to cover her debt, but thanks in part to a hardship deferment, she's up to date on her loans for now, and her parents are helping with health insurance.
Debt is choking twentysomethings higher up the career ladder, too. I heard from another Jennifer, who is 29. Four years ago, she bought a small two-bedroom condo. Now she and her husband—they got married last year—want to move and plan to have kids. "It's not what I want at this point in my life," she writes of her condo. "Having spent the past 10 years living in suburban multifamily housing, I'm sick of hearing my neighbor's alarm clocks, schlepping 350 feet between my car and my front door, and putting up with the guy downstairs who entertains on his patio until 2 a.m."
But if Jennifer and her husband sold, they would take a loss and have nothing left for a down payment on a new place. Nor do they feel like they can look ahead and see a higher income. Jennifer makes more than her husband, but she thinks she has "hit the ceiling" at her job. "I work in local government and there's definitely a boys vs. girls mentality." Her husband spends half his paycheck on student loan debt—together, they pay off $1,800 a month. If one of them gets laid off, they would have no cushion to land on. "Sure, other people have it worse, and I am thankful that my husband and I are both employed," Jennifer says. "Still, this is the time in our lives when we're supposed to be making a future for ourselves, yet our seemingly good salaries don't get us anywhere. In 10 years, when I'm 39 and my husband is 40, we'll be in exactly the same place we are today—living in a starter condo … with no children of our own."
Jennifer is beating herself up for one decision she now regrets—spending $10,000 on her wedding and honeymoon last year. Getting married has also meant a higher tax bill. (Are you listening, Congress?) And, as a couple, Jennifer and her husband aren't eligible for a first-time homebuyer tax credit since she already owns.
I got another e-mail highlighting a love-and-relationship regret, from Heidi, who graduated from college in 2005 and landed a job with an architecture firm. "My employer was fantastic and I thought things were going to be smooth sailing while I worked to become a licensed architect," she writes. But last August, she moved to another city to be near her fiance. She found a not-as-good job. And then she got laid off. That was in November. In the months since, she's wrangled only two job interviews and no offers. Her fiance's company is going through a second round of reorganization, and while he survived the first round, it doesn't look good this time. He has no savings. Her unemployment insurance is running out. Going out with friends makes her feel resentful about the money she no longer has. "I have become more of a hermit and don't like to leave the apartment anymore," she says.
One step down from there, emotionally speaking: Last week I talked to a 26-year-old named Candice who lives in North Carolina. She'd written to say that she can't pay for therapy for her depression anymore because she has no job and absolutely no money. ("I have some spare change that I keep in a change purse in my dresser," she writes.) In August, Candice graduated from James Madison University with a master's degree in English. She is the first person in her immediate family to go to college. She wants to get a Ph.D. in literature and women's studies, to study the works of Margaret Atwood. But she can't afford to. Her parents, meanwhile, are having trouble understanding why she can't find work after months of searching. They're both ill and have to spend heavily for prescription medications. It is all an enormous, hopeless-feeling strain.
Since twentysomethings are often accused of whining, let me say that the e-mails in my inbox don't do that. They are about scrambling to make sense of changed, and reduced, expectations and are not filled with self-pity, or at least not of the maudlin, unjustified sort. Generation Y has a pretty good argument for being the worst off right now. They may not have kids and significant family responsibilities and bills yet. But along with their school debt, they havea lot of loss to contend with as they peer forward into the uncertainty ahead.
Some of them, also, are adjusting to not expecting much from work or ambition. There's a bad side to this: Shala talked about a long wait for a promised promotion, thinking of herself as someone who would "demand fair pay and fairly value my own worth." Now she doesn't want to insist on the title change because she's afraid the company would then have to pay her more—and she'd be more vulnerable to a layoff. Yet there's some good to be fished out of reduced expectations, too. Shannon, who works for AmeriCorps in New York City, wrote about how getting used to a basic lifestyle makes her less, rather than more, worried about what comes next. (It surely helps that she has no college debt.)
Shannon wrote earnestly about her hope that the recession would get us all back on track by encouraging Americans "to better understand or at least admit the interconnectedness of our society." I'm not so sure. But I'm glad there's still a bit of youthful optimism out there.
***
I got so many great e-mails from Gen Y-ers—you are a hugely articulate bunch of readers!—that I'm going to write another column discussing their decisions about school: whether to go to grad school or stay there, etc. More thoughts and stories about that are welcome. Send them to me at doublex.slate@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise. If you want to be quoted anonymously, please let me know.
Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical teachings was something new. This is not the case.
I remember being in Israel in 1986 when the chief army "chaplain" in the occupied territories, Rabbi Shmuel Derlich, issued his troops a 1,000-word pastoral letter enjoining them to apply the biblical commandment to exterminate the Amalekites as "the enemies of Israel." Nobody has recently encountered any Amalekites, so the chief educational officer of the Israeli Defense Forces asked Rabbi Derlich whether he would care to define his terms and say whom he meant. Rather evasively—if rather alarmingly—the man of God replied, "Germans." There are no Germans in Judaea and Samaria or, indeed, in the Old Testament, so the rabbi's exhortation to slay all Germans as well as quite probably all Palestinians was referred to the Judge Advocate General's Office. Forty military rabbis publicly came to Derlich's support, and the rather spineless conclusion of the JAG was that he had committed no legal offense but should perhaps refrain in the future from making political statements on the army's behalf.
The problem here is precisely that the rabbi was not making a "political" statement. Rather, he was doing his religious duty in reminding his readers what the Torah actually says. It's not at all uncommon in Israel to read discussions, featuring military rabbis, of quite how to interpret the following holy order from Moses, in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 31, Verses 13-18, as quoted from my 1985 translation by the Jewish Publication Society. The Israelites have just done a fairly pitiless job on the Midianites, slaughtering all of the adult males. But, says their stern commander-in-chief, they have still failed him:
Moses, Eleazer the priest, and all the chieftains of the community came out to meet them outside the camp. Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. Moses said to them, "You have spared every female! Yet they are the very ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, so that the Lord's community was struck by the plague. Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every young woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man."
Moses and Eleazar the priest go on to issue some complex instructions about the ritual cleansings that must be practiced after this exhausting massacre has been completed.
Now, it's common to hear people say, when this infamous passage and others like it come up, that it's not intended to be "taken literally." One also often hears the excuse that some wicked things are done "in the name of" religion, as if the wicked things were somehow the result of a misinterpretation. But the nationalist rabbis who prepare Israeli soldiers for their mission seem to think that this book might be the word of God, in which case the only misinterpretation would be the failure to take it literally. (I hate to break it to you, but the people who think that God's will is revealed in scripture are known as "religious." Those who do not think so must try to find another name for themselves.)
Possibly you remember Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. Now read Ethan Bronner's report in the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army's latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has "said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred." Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest: Moses and Eleazar combined. The latest news, according to Bronner, is that the Israeli Defense Ministry has felt compelled to reprimand Rontzski for "a rabbinal edict against showing the enemy mercy" that was distributed in booklet form to men and women in uniform (see Numbers 31:13-18, above).
Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties that has immediately resulted, it's fairly easy to see where this is going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs. The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein's rampage and the Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Once considered highly extreme, such biblical exegeses are moving ever closer to the mainstream. It's high time the United States cut off any financial support for Israel that can be used even indirectly for settler activity, not just because such colonization constitutes a theft of another people's land but also because our Constitution absolutely forbids us to spend public money on the establishment of any religion.
It was what I did to the macaroni and cheese that made me seek professional help.
My husband and I were looking for new ways to use the vegetables from our CSA—a program, short for "community supported agriculture," in which you pay in advance for a weekly box of fresh produce delivered from a local organic farm. We've been members of this particular CSA for about three years, and for the most part, we love it. In August, we receive endless tomatoes. In June, we're invited to a farm event called "strawberry day." Every time we resubscribe, they send us a lavender sachet. But each year, toward the end of winter, I run into the Turnip Problem.
Ordinarily, I would never eat turnips. I managed to go 30 years without buying one. But now every winter I'm faced with a two-month supply, not to mention the kale, collards, and flat-leaf Italian parsley that sit in my refrigerator, slowly wilting, filling me with guilt every time I reach past them for the milk. After three years of practice, I've figured out simple ways to deal with most of these problem vegetables: I braise the turnips in butter and white wine; I sauté the kale and collards with olive oil and sea salt; I wait until the parsley shrivels and then throw it out. The abundance of roughage is overwhelming.
It's a problem that affects anyone who tries to eat seasonally or consume a wider variety of vegetables, as an increasing number of Michael Pollan-ated Americans are trying to do. But it becomes especially acute when you're faced with a new delivery each week, whether you're ready for it or not. One friend confessed "utter panic" at the sight of tomatillos. When I asked another what he did with his mustard greens, he responded, straight-faced, "I take them home, put them in my refrigerator, and wait until they rot." Cabbage, kohlrabi, collards, bok choy—everyone, it seems, has their problem vegetables. And, like me, many feel guilty about it. When our farm's CSA manager, an enthusiastic woman who has been known to use the words tasty and rutabaga in the same sentence, revealed that her problem vegetable was the radish, she immediately asked for forgiveness: "I know I should embrace it more and am getting better."
But along with their confessions, friends shared success stories, too: recipes for winter ravioli, vegetable stock, curried cauliflower, even chimichurri sauce. Their creativity made me remember how my box used to make me feel—the thrill of my first vegetable custard, the rush of a successful butternut squash soup. Somewhere along the way, I had lost the faith. I wanted it back.
Which brings me to the macaroni. When my husband came home excited about a recipe for Martha Stewart's "perfect macaroni and cheese," I refused to make it unless we could incorporate one of our vegetables. With six and a half cups of cheese and an entire stick of butter, it had enough fat to camouflage anything. Surely, I insisted, we could swap the macaroni with turnips.
I was wrong. Our goal was a rich, creamy interior topped by a crispy, cheesy crust. But far from absorbing excess liquid, the vegetables released it. Our white sauce became a watery soup; our kitchen filled with turnips' telltale scent.
It was time to call in the experts. So I phoned Mark Bittman, author of the ubiquitous classic How To Cook Everything, to see what suggestions he had for overcoming vegetable fatigue.
Bittman, who used to belong to a CSA in New Haven, Conn., pointed out that complaining about a surplus of vegetables in the dead of winter made me sound like a spoiled Californian. Feeling defensive—sure, he was right, but he hadn't answered the question of what he would do with winter produce if he were lucky enough to have it—I challenged him to a game of vegetable free association. I would throw out a problematic vegetable; he would tell me the first preparation that came to mind.
"I love that," he said. "Go."
"Daikon radish," I began, skipping any pretense at a warm-up.
He didn't miss a beat. "Raw, grated, with soy sauce and sesame oil."
"Cabbage."
"Sauté it with garlic, brown it, shrivel it, maybe turn it into fried rice."
"Parsley."
"Parsley is a staple. You should be using it by the handful daily anyway. It can go on top of anything. Just use it."
A bag full of parsley was currently rotting in my green bin, but I refused to be chastened. "Butternut squash."
"I like to grate butternut squash, cook it with olive oil and garlic, and toss it with pasta."
"Kiwi," I said, trying to catch him off guard. We'd been getting them by the bagful for almost a month, and my counter was covered in furry brown balls. "Is there any way to eat them other than just as a fruit?"
He thought for a moment. "Not that I know of. And I don't even think they're that good."
I came away from our conversation convinced that my kitchen was suffering from a lack of sesame oil and buoyed by a newfound zest for collards. But helpful as our conversation had been, there was still one person I needed to reach.
For CSA devotees, talking to Deborah Madison—founder of San Francisco's iconic vegetarian restaurant Greens and author of nine cookbooks—is the equivalent of getting a personal phone call from Barack Obama. "I do find that kale sits in my refrigerator longer than other things," she confessed when I called her. "And I sometimes forget what to do with turnips." But Madison's love of fresh produce could not be suppressed. Kale, she said, goes well with the "softness and neutrality" of black-eyed peas. Radish greens' peppery bite is reminiscent of arugula, and they can be braised along with their roots or mashed into butter. She praised butternut squash as being "very utilitarian" but then paused. "I hate to say so," she said, as if she had admitted to having a favorite child. "There are so many other great squashes out there."
I realized my problem was not that I had lost my creativity but, rather, that I was trying too hard, as evidenced by my attraction to any recipe containing the word gratin. Rather than covering my vegetables in béchamel sauce, I should be making recipes that complemented and highlighted their natural flavors.
Several hours later, I received a new box, containing kale, lettuce, butternut squash, and still more turnips. Previously, this would have filled me with dread, but I felt a sense of renewed optimism. Perhaps I would turn those turnips into soup. Maybe the squash could find its way into ravioli. The green garlic radiated possibility; the stir-fry mix exuded hope. And for those vegetables whose natural flavors still required an additional punch, I could fall back on a piece of advice from Mark Bittman: "A little bacon can go a long way."
Press the reset button. Is there any phrase more enticing in the modern lexicon? We all know what it means: Press the reset button, watch your computer reboot, and presto! A nice, clean screen appears, and you start again from scratch.
Yes, it's a wonderful feeling, pressing that reset button. Unfortunately, it is also a deeply misleading, even vapid, metaphor for diplomatic relations. Recently invoked by the vice president—Joe Biden told a security conference in February it was time to "press the reset button" on U.S. relations with Russia—the expression was reiterated by the president, who spoke of the need to "reset or reboot" the relationship. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton even presented her Russian counterpart, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, with a red "reset button." Despite an unfortunate mistranslation (the Russian word printed on the gift actually meant "overload," not "reset"), they smiled and pressed the button together for the cameras.
It would be nice, of course, if U.S.-Russia relations really had been frozen because of irrelevant technical complications and could now begin again afresh. Unfortunately, while America may have a new president, Russia does not. And while America may want to make the past vanish—as a nation, we've never been all that keen on foreign history—alas, the past cannot be changed. The profound differences in psychology, philosophy, and policy that have been the main source of friction between the American and Russian governments for the past decade remain in place. Sooner or later, the Obama administration will have to grapple with them.
Anyone who doubts the truth of this forecast needs only to have a look at remarks Lavrov made last weekend in Brussels, where he presented a vision of the world utterly unchanged by the events of Jan. 20. Speaking to past and present policymakers—several of whom helped to dismember the Warsaw Pact and expand NATO in the 1990s—he offered his own version of those events as well as of some more current ones. Among other things, he said, or implied, that the West lied to Russia; that NATO remains a threat to Russia; that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe should replace NATO as the primary Western security organization; and that, by the way, Russia has plenty of potential clients for its gas in the Far East should its Western clients ever become problematic. As for Russia helping to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons—an Obama administration suggestion—his lead comment was that "there is no proof that Iran even has decided to make a nuclear bomb."
The transcript of his remarks, and those of other Russians attending the same conference, does not capture their snide tone or the scorn with which they dismissed suggestions that Russia's neighbors might have wanted to join NATO because they were afraid of Russia. To return to the metaphor: If that is how the Russia government sounds after pressing the reset button, I'm not sure that the technical complications that caused the screen to freeze have gone away.
Nor is this true of Russia alone. Any president can legitimately call for a fresh start in his relations with the world, and none more so than the current American president, who replaces an unpopular predecessor. Sooner or later, however, Obama will also have to make difficult decisions about regimes that oppose U.S. policy for reasons deeper than dislike of George W. Bush. If Russia persists in its occupation of Georgia, do we accept that situation? If Russia uses its energy policy to blackmail Europe, do we go along with that, too?
The rest of the world is no different. It's a fine thing to open diplomatic relations with Iran or Syria—I've always thought it extremely stupid that we have no embassy, and thus no resident intelligence officer, in Tehran—as long as we remember that talking is not a solution: Sometimes more "dialogue" reveals deeper differences. It's also a fine thing for the president to issue greetings on the occasion of the Persian new year, but that might not dampen the popularity of Iran's nuclear program among both adherents and opponents of its current government. What then?
I do realize that these are early days. The traditional, deadly struggle for influence between the State Department and the National Security Council is only just getting under way, and the president has other things on his mind. But the gift of a "reset button," however translated, was not a good beginning. If this administration thinks it can transform America's relationships with Russia or anyone else with the flick of a switch and a change of rhetoric, then it is living in a virtual reality, not a real one.
The other morning I looked at my BlackBerry and saw an e-mail from my mother. At last! I thought. I've missed her so much. Then I caught myself. The e-mail couldn't be from my mother. My mother died a month ago.
The e-mail was from a publicist with the same first name: Barbara. The name was all that had showed up on the screen.
My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer sometime before 3 p.m. on Christmas Day. I can't say the exact time, because none of us thought to look at a clock for some time after she stopped breathing. She was in a hospital bed in the living room of my parents' house (now my father's house) in Connecticut with my father, my two younger brothers, and me. She had been unconscious for five days. She opened her eyes only when we moved her, which caused her extreme pain, and so we began to move her less and less, despite cautions from the hospice nurses about bedsores.
For several weeks before her death, my mother had been experiencing some confusion due to ammonia building up in her brain as her liver began to fail. And yet, irrationally, I am confident my mother knew what day it was when she died. I believe she knew we were around her. And I believe she chose to die when she did. Christmas was her favorite day of the year; she loved the morning ritual of walking the dogs, making coffee as we all waited impatiently for her to be ready, then slowly opening presents, drawing the gift-giving out for hours. This year, she couldn't walk the dogs or make coffee, but her bed was in the room where our tree was, and as we opened presents that morning, she made a madrigal of quiet sounds, as if to indicate that she was with us.
Since my mother's death, I have been in grief. I walk down the street; I answer my phone; I brush my hair; I manage, at times, to look like a normal person, but I don't feel normal. I am not surprised to find that it is a lonely life: After all, the person who brought me into the world is gone. But it is more than that. I feel not just that I am but that the world around me is deeply unprepared to deal with grief. Nearly every day I get e-mails from people who write: "I hope you're doing well." It's a kind sentiment, and yet sometimes it angers me. I am not OK. Nor do I find much relief in the well-meant refrain that at least my mother is "no longer suffering." Mainly, I feel one thing: My mother is dead, and I want her back. I really want her back—sometimes so intensely that I don't even want to heal. At least, not yet.
Nothing about the past losses I have experienced prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me in the least. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. What makes it worse is that my mother was young: 55. The loss I feel stems partly from feeling robbed of 20 more years with her I'd always imagined having.
I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands. I am aware that I am one of the lucky ones. I am an adult. My mother had a good life. We had insurance that allowed us to treat her cancer and to keep her as comfortable as possible before she died. And in the past year, I got to know my mother as never before. I went with her to the hospital and bought her lunch while she had chemotherapy, searching for juices that wouldn't sting the sores in her mouth. We went to a spiritual doctor who made her sing and passed crystals over her body. We shopped for new clothes together, standing frankly in our underwear in the changing room after years of being shyly polite with our bodies. I crawled into bed with her and stroked her hair when she cried in frustration that she couldn't go to work. I grew to love my mother in ways I never had. Some of the new intimacy came from finding myself in a caretaking role where, before, I had been the one taken care of. But much of it came from being forced into openness by our sense that time was passing. Every time we had a cup of coffee together (when she was well enough to drink coffee), I thought, against my will: This could be the last time I have coffee with my mother.
Grief is common, as Hamlet's mother Gertrude brusquely reminds him. We know it exists in our midst. But I am suddenly aware of how difficult it is for us to confront it. And to the degree that we do want to confront it, we do so in the form of self-help: We want to heal our grief. We want to achieve an emotional recovery. We want our grief to be teleological, and we've assigned it five tidy stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yet as we've come to frame grief as a psychological process, we've also made it more private. Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore—we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail. We may—I have done it—weep and rail privately, in the middle of the night. But we don't have the rituals of public mourning around which the individual experience of grief were once constellated.
And in the weeks since my mother died, I have felt acutely the lack of these rituals. I was not prepared for how hard I would find it to re-enter the slipstream of contemporary life, our world of constant connectivity and immediacy, so ill-suited to reflection. I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish—a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person. So I began wondering: What does it mean to grieve in a culture that—for many of us, at least—has few ceremonies for observing it? What is it actually like to grieve? In a series of pieces over the next few weeks, I'll delve into these questions and also look at the literature of grieving, from memoirs to medical texts. I'll be doing so from an intellectual perspective, but also from a personal one: I want to write about grief from the inside out. I will be writing about my grief, of course, and I don't pretend that it is universal. But I hope these pieces will reflect something about the paradox of loss, with its monumental sublimity and microscopic intimacy.
If you have a story or thought about grieving you'd like to share, please e-mail me at morourkexx@gmail.com.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious. And until my mother grew ill, I might not have described myself as deeply spiritual. I used to find it infuriating when people offered up the—to me—empty consolation that whatever happened, she "will always be there with you."
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. She took one slow, rattling breath; then, 30 seconds later, another; then she opened her eyes and looked at us, and took a last. As she exhaled, her face settled into repose. Her body grew utterly still, and yet she seemed present. I felt she had simply been transferred into another substance; what substance, where it might be located, I wasn't quite sure.
I went outside onto my parents' porch without putting my coat on. The limp winter sun sparkled off the frozen snow on the lawn. "Please take good care of my mother," I said to the air. I addressed the fir tree she loved and the wind moving in it. "Please keep her safe for me."
This is what a friend of mine—let's call her Rose—calls "finding a metaphor." I was visiting her a few weeks ago in California; we stayed up late, drinking lemon-ginger tea and talking about the difficulty of grieving, its odd jags of ecstasy and pain. Her father died several years ago, and it was easy to speak with her: She was in what more than one acquaintance who's lost a parent has now referred to as "the club." It's not a club any of us wished to join, but I, for one, am glad it exists. It makes mourning less lonely. I told Rose how I envied my Jewish friends the reassuring ritual of saying kaddish. She talked about the hodge-podge of traditions she had embraced in the midst of her grief. And then she asked me, "Have you found a metaphor?"
"A metaphor?"
"Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?"
I knew immediately what Rose meant. I had. It was the sky—the wind. (The cynic in me cringes on rereading this. But, in fact, it's how I feel.) When I got home to Brooklyn, I asked one of my mother's friends whether she had a metaphor for where my mother was. She unhesitatingly answered: "The water. The ocean."
The idea that my mother might be somewhere rather than nowhere is one that's hard for the skeptical empiricist in me to swallow. When my grandfather died last September, he seemed to me merely—gone. On a safari in South Africa a few weeks later, I saw two female lions kill a zebra. The zebra struggled for three or four long minutes; as soon as he stopped, his body seemed to be only flesh. (When I got home the next week, I found out that my mother had learned that same day that her cancer had returned. It spooked me.)
But I never felt my mother leave the world.
At times I simply feel she's just on a long trip—and am jolted to realize it's one she's not coming back from. I'm reminded of an untitled poem I love by Franz Wright, a contemporary American poet, which has new meaning. It reads, in full:
I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
Sometimes I recite this to myself as I walk around.
At lunch yesterday, as velvety snow coated the narrow Brooklyn street, I attempted to talk about this haunted feeling with a friend whose son died a few years ago. She told me that she, too, feels that her son is with her. They have conversations. She's an intellectually exacting person, and she told me that she had sometimes wondered about how to conceptualize her—well, let's call it a persistent intuition. A psychiatrist reframed it for her: He reminded her that the sensation isn't merely an empty notion. The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
That's a kind of comfort. But I confess I felt a sudden resistance of the therapist's view. The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head. Every now and then, I see a tree shift in the wind and its bend has, to my eye, a distinctly maternal cast. For me, my metaphor is—as all good metaphors ought to be—a persuasive transformation. In these moments, I do not say to myself that my mother is like the wind; I think she is the wind. I feel her: there, and there. One sad day, I actually sat up in shock when I felt my mother come shake me out of a pervasive fearfulness that was making it hard for me to read or get on subways. Whether it was the ghostly flicker of my synapses, or an actual ghostly flicker of her spirit, I don't know. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping it was the latter.
A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore. Some researchers have found that it is "easier" to experience a death if you know for at least six months that your loved one is terminally ill. But this fact is like orders of infinity: there in theory, hard to detect in practice. On my birthday, a month after my mother passed away, a friend mused out loud that my mom's death was surely easier to bear because I knew it was coming. I almost bit her head off: Easier to bear compared to what—the time she died of a heart attack? Instead, I bit my tongue.
What studies actually say is that I'll begin to "accept" my mother's death more quickly than I would have in the case of a sudden loss—possibly because I experienced what researchers call "anticipatory grief" while she was still alive. In the meantime, it sucks as much as any other death. You still feel like you're pacing in the chilly dark outside a house with lit-up windows, wishing you could go inside. You feel clueless about the rules of shelter and solace in this new environment you've been exiled to.
And that is why one afternoon, about three weeks after my mother died, I Googled "grief."
I was having a bad day. It was 2 p.m., and I was supposed to be doing something. Instead, I was sitting on my bed (which I had actually made, in compensation for everything else undone) wondering: Was it normal to feel everything was pointless? Would I always feel this way? I wanted to know more. I wanted to get a picture of this strange experience from the outside, instead of the melted inside. So I Googled—feeling a little like Lindsay in Freaks and Geeks, in the episode where she smokes a joint, gets way too high, and digs out an encyclopedia to learn more about "marijuana." Only information can prevent her from feeling that she's floating away.
The clinical literature on grief is extensive. Much of it reinforces what even the newish mourner has already begun to realize: Grief isn't rational; it isn't linear; it is experienced in waves. Joan Didion talks about this in The Year of Magical Thinking, her remarkable memoir about losing her husband while her daughter was ill: "[V]irtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of waves," she writes. She quotes a 1944 description by Michael Lindemann, then chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He defines grief as:
sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.
Intensive subjective distress. Yes, exactly: That was the objective description I was looking for. The experience is, as Lindemann notes, brutally physiological: It literally takes your breath away. This is also what makes grief so hard to communicate to anyone who hasn't experienced it.
One thing I learned is that researchers believe there are two kinds of grief: "normal grief" and "complicated grief" (which is also called "prolonged grief"). Normal grief is a term for the feeling most bereaved people experience, which peaks within the first six months and then begins to dissipate. ("Complicated grief" does not—and evidence suggests that many parents who lose children are experiencing something more like complicated grief.) Calling grief "normal" makes it sound mundane, but, as one researcher underscored to me, its symptoms are extreme. They include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems, and dryness of mouth.
I have had all of these symptoms, including one (quite banal) hallucination at dinner with a friend. (I saw a waitress bring him ice cream. I could even see the flecks in the ice cream. Vanilla bean, I thought. But there was no ice cream.) In addition to these symptoms, I have one more: I can't spell. Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller. Now I have to rely on dictionaries to ascertain whether tranquility has one L or two. My Googling helped explain this new trouble with orthography: Some studies have suggested that mourning takes a toll on cognitive function. And I am still in a stage of fairly profound grief. I can say this with confidence because I have affirmation from a tool called "The Texas Revised Inventory of Grief"—one of the tests psychiatrists use to measure psychological distress among the bereaved. Designed for use after time has gone by, this test suggested that, yes, I was very, very sad. (To its list of statements like "I still get upset when I think about the person who died," I answered, "Completely True"—the most extreme answer on a scale of one to five, with five being "Completely False.")
Mainly, I realized, I wanted to know if there was any empirical evidence supporting the infamous "five stages of grief." Mention that you had a death in the family, and a stranger will perk up his ears and start chattering about the five stages. But I was not feeling the stages. Not the way I was supposed to. The notion was popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her famous 1969 study On Death and Dying. At the time, Kübler-Ross felt—accurately—that there was a problem with how the medical establishment dealt with death. During the 1960s, American doctors often concealed from patients the fact that they were terminally ill, and many died without knowing how sick they were. Kübler-Ross asked several theology students to help her interview patients in hospitals and then reported on what she discovered.
By writing openly about how the dying felt, Kübler-Ross helped demystify the experience of death and made the case that the dying deserved to know—in fact, often wanted to know—that they were terminal. She also exposed the anger and avoidance that patients, family members, and doctors often felt in the face of death. And she posited that, according to what she had seen, for both the dying and their families, grieving took the form of five emotional stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Of course, like so many other ideas popularized in the 1970s, the five stages turned out to be more complex than initially thought. There is little empirical evidence suggesting that we actually experience capital-letter Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance in simple sequence. In On Grief and Grieving, published years later, Kübler-Ross insists she never meant to suggest the stages were sequential. But if you read On Death and Dying—as I just did—you'll find that this is slightly disingenuous. In it, she does imply, for example, that anger must be experienced before bargaining. (I tried, then, to tackle On Grief and Grieving but threw it across the room in a fit of frustration at its feel-good emphasis on "healing.") Researchers at Yale recently conducted an extensive study of bereavement and found that Kübler-Ross' stages were more like states. While people did experience those emotions, the dominant feeling they experienced after a death was yearning or pining.
Yearning is definitely what I feel. I keep thinking of a night, 13 years ago, when I took a late flight to Dublin, where I was going to live for six months. This would be the longest time I had ever been away from home. I woke up disoriented in my seat at 1 a.m. to see a spectacular display of the aurora borealis. I had never seen anything like it. The twisting lights in the sky seemed to evoke a presence, a living force. I felt a sudden, acute desire to turn around and go back—not just to my worried parents back in Brooklyn, but deep into my childhood, into my mother's arms holding me on those late nights when we would drive home from dinner at a neighbor's house in Maine, and she would sing a lullaby and tell me to put my head on her soft, warm shoulder. And I would sleep.
I had a hard time sleeping right after my mother died. The nights were long and had their share of what C.S. Lewis, in his memoir A Grief Observed, calls "mad, midnight … entreaties spoken into the empty air." One of the things I did was read. I read lots of books about death and loss. But one said more to me about grieving than any other: Hamlet. I'm not alone in this. A colleague recently told me that after his mother died he listened over and over to a tape recording he'd made of the Kenneth Branagh film version.
I had always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. I saw his sense that "the world is out of joint" as vague and philosophical. He's a depressive, self-obsessed young man who can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading the play after my mother's death, I felt differently. Hamlet's moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn't know how to handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed. I can relate. When Hamlet comes onstage he is greeted by his uncle with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" It reminded me of the friend who said, 14 days after my mother died, "Hope you're doing well." No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey.
Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It's not just that Hamlet is sad; it's that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. And Shakespeare doesn't flinch from that truth. He captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it is all too explainable. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is "common." His uncle Claudius chides him to put aside his "unmanly grief." It's not just guilty people who act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of your "sterile promontory"? Even if they wanted to, how could they? And this tension between your private sadness and the busy old world is a huge part of what I feel as I grieve—and felt most intensely in the first weeks of loss. Even if, as a friend helpfully pointed out, my mother wasn't murdered.
I am also moved by how much in Hamlet is about slippage—the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer. To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too, had "lost all my mirth." My colleague put it better: "Hamlet is the grief-slacker's Bible, a knowing book that understands what you're going through and doesn't ask for much in return," he wrote to me. Maybe that's because the entire play is as drenched in grief as it is in blood. There is Ophelia's grief at Hamlet's angry withdrawal from her. There is Laertes' grief that Polonius and Ophelia die. There is Gertrude and Claudius' grief, which is as fake as the flowers in a funeral home. Everyone is sad and messed up. If only the court had just let Hamlet feel bad about his dad, you start to feel, things in Denmark might not have disintegrated so quickly!
Hamlet also captures one of the aspects of grief I find it most difficult to speak about—the profound sense of ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. After my mother died, I felt that abruptly, amid the chaos that is daily life, I had arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Everything seemed exhausting. Nothing seemed important. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. At one point during that first month, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. Hamlet's soliloquy captures that numb exhaustion, and now I read it as a true expression of grief:
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Those adjectives felt apt. And so, even, does the pained wish—in my case, thankfully fleeting—that one might melt away. Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicideality (or suicidal thinking and behaviors) than the depressed. For many, that risk is quite acute. For others of us, this passage captures how passive a form those thoughts can take. Hamlet is less searching for death actively than he is wishing powerfully for the pain just to go away. And it is, to be honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go as far into them as Hamlet does. (So far, I have not accidentally killed anyone with a dagger, for example.)
The way Hamlet speaks conveys his grief as much as what he says. He talks in run-on sentences to Ophelia. He slips between like things without distinguishing fully between them—"to die, to sleep" and "to sleep, perchance to dream." He resorts to puns because puns free him from the terrible logic of normalcy, which has nothing to do with grief and cannot fully admit its darkness.
And Hamlet's madness, too, makes new sense. He goes mad because madness is the only method that makes sense in a world tyrannized by false logic. If no one can tell whether he is mad, it is because he cannot tell either. Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. No wonder Hamlet said, "… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive.
Like Hamlet, I, too, find it difficult to remember that my own "change in disposition" is connected to a distinct event. Most of the time, I just feel that I see the world more accurately than I used to. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") Pessimists, after all, are said to have a more realistic view of themselves in the world than optimists.
The other piece of writing I have been drawn to is a poem by George Herbert called "The Flower." It opens:
How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recover'd greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
Quite underground, I keep house unknown: It does seem the right image of wintry grief. I look forward to the moment when I can say the first sentence of the second stanza and feel its wonder as my own.
After my mother died, one of my brothers told me he had been dreaming about her. He was comforted by this. I was envious. I was not dreaming about her, and my main fear, in those first days, was that I would forget what her face looked like. I told an old friend this. He just looked at me and said, "That's not going to happen." I didn't know how he could know this, but I was comforted by his certainty.
Then, about a month later, I began to dream about her. The dreams are not frequent, but they are powerful. Unlike dreams I had about my mother when she was alive, these dreams seem to capture her as she truly was. They seem, in some sense, beyond my own invention, as if, in the nether-realm of sleep, we truly are visiting each other. These visits, though, are always full of boundaries—boundaries, that, judging from other mourners' accounts, seem almost universal.
The first dream was set in both the past and the present. And it captured an identity confusion that is, apparently, not uncommon right after a loved one dies. In the dream, it was summertime, and my mother and I were standing outside a house like one we used to go to on Cape Cod. There was a sandy driveway and a long dirt road. We were going to get ice cream, and we were saying goodbye to my youngest brother, who is 12 years younger than I am; in the dream, he was just a little boy. When I looked at him, I felt an oceanic sadness, but I didn't know why. He smiled and waved from the porch as my mother and I pulled out; I was driving, which struck me as odd in the dream. (My mother loved to drive, and I learned to drive only last year; she taught me.)
As we headed down the long road, my mother talked about my brother, telling me I didn't need to be anxious about him. It became clear she was going somewhere, though I couldn't figure out where. The conversation replicated one we had while she was in the hospital, when I reassured her that my brother (now in college) would be OK, and that I'd help look after him. Only in the dream, she was playing me and I was playing her. The dream had a quality so intense I can still feel it: I am as sad as I have ever been, as if ice is being poured down my windpipe, and I keep trying to turn so I can see my mother, but I have to keep my eyes on the road.
In the next dream, I am at my parents' house in Connecticut with my father and one of my brothers, when, to our surprise, my mother walks into the kitchen. Somehow, we all know she will die in six days. She seems healthy, although her fate hangs around her and separates her from us. Even so, her eyes are bright and dark, darker than I remember them being. We ask her what she is doing that day. She tells us, with a sly smile, that she is going to something called Suicide Park. I become upset. She reassures me. "I'm not going to there to commit suicide, Meg," she says. "It's a place where people who know they're dying go to do risky things they might not do otherwise—like jump out of a plane." She's excited, like a bride on the precipice of a life-changing ritual. I am happy to see her face, and I never want her to leave.
(Two days later, I tell her friend Eleanor about my dream, and she goes silent on the phone. Then she asks, "Did you know that your mother told me she wanted to jump out of a plane?" No, I say. "One Friday this fall, when she had to stay home from school, I was at the house with her, and she said: 'I really want to jump out a plane before I die.' I said, 'B, you can't—you'll hurt your knee.' But she got upset. So we tried to figure out how she might really jump out a plane. She also wanted to learn Italian. This was when we thought she had more time.")
The third dream had the quality of a visitation. Again, I am at my parents' house in Connecticut, feeling anxious about work. In the den, I tell my father, who is watching football, that I need to go back to New York, and he gets up to look at the train schedule. As he rises, I become aware in my peripheral vision that there are holiday ornaments on the kitchen table, and that people are sitting there. "Stay another night," I hear my mother's voice say, and I look up to see that she is the person at the table. She looks at me, but her hands are busy—either knitting or kneading dough for apple pie. "Stay another night," she says again, with longing in her voice. "Of course," I say, happy I can grant this wish, so simple yet so fundamental. When I woke that morning, I felt calm and peaceful. The voice was my mother's voice, and for the first time, her face was my mother's face. I felt that she had been saying something important to me; I wasn't quite sure what it was, but it had to do with how she loved me; I was still her daughter.
My middle brother has told me about some of his dreams, too. And I am struck by the continuities among all of them. Our dreams almost seem to follow certain rules of genre. In all, I know my mother is gone and that she will never be back as before. But I am given a moment to be with her, to say something, or to share a look or a feeling. In most, the important conversation comes when we are alone together, although another family member may be present on the outskirts. I am never fully able to grasp her; in the first, the car was a barrier between us; in a recent dream, I held her hand over the barrier of a hospital bed. My brother's dreams are similar. (His, I find, are even more beautiful and evocative than mine.) We both experience a quality of being visited, of being comforted, though we also feel a sense of a distance that cannot be traversed. Many readers who have written to me have reported a similar sense of feeling visited from a great distance.
Every time I wake from these dreams, I am reminded of passages from epics like The Aeneid in which the heroes go to the Underworld to see their fathers and cannot embrace them, though they can see them. Or of the beautiful sonnet by Milton about his wife, who died in childbirth. Recounting a dream about her, he writes, "Me thought I saw my late espoused saint," and then invokes her disappearance at precisely the moment they try to touch : "But oh! As to embrace me she inclin'd,/ I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night." What surprises me is how comforted I feel when I wake. I am sad that the dream has ended, but it's not the depleted sadness I've felt in the past when I've woken up from a wishful dream. I feel, instead, replete, reassured, like a child who has kicked the covers off her in her sleep on a chilly night and dimly senses as her mother steals into the dark room, pulls them up over her, strokes her hair, and gives her a kiss before leaving.
The other night, I was talking to my father on the phone, remembering my mother, when he happened to mention a "loss of confidence" that "we" (that is, our family) had all experienced. I asked him what he meant. I had been noticing that I feel shy and insecure ever since my mother died, but I had assumed my insecurity was particular to me; I've always been a nervous person, especially compared with my sociable brothers. But here was my father talking about something he saw all of us suffering from. He explained. "Your mother is not there," he said. "And we are dealing with her absence. It makes us feel, I think, a loss of confidence—a general loss, an uncertainty about what we can rely on."
Perhaps that's why I've gone to the desert twice since my mother died. Not only does the physical desert reflect back at me my spiritual desert, it doesn't have a lot of people in it—allowing me to enjoy solitude without feeling cut off, as I would if I were hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment. In January, three weeks after my mom's death, I flew to L.A. and then drove to the Mojave Desert, where I spent a few days wandering around Joshua Tree National Park. Being alone under the warm blue sky made me feel closer to my mother, as it often has. I felt I could detect her in the haze at the horizons. I offered a little prayer up to her, and, for the first time since she died, I talked out loud to her. I was walking along past the cacti, when I looked out into the rocky distance. "Hello mother," I whispered. "I miss you so much." Then I started crying, and, ridiculously, apologized. "I'm sorry. I don't want you to feel bad. I know you had to leave." Even now, whenever I talk to my mother—I do it every few weeks, and always when I'm outdoors—I cry and then apologize because I don't want her to feel guilt or sorrow that she can't be here with me as she used to be. A part of me believes this concern is foolish. But it is intrinsic to the magical thinking at the heart of the ritual. I am powerless over it.
Just last week, I went to Marfa, Texas, a town in the Chinati Desert in far west Texas, near Mexico. One afternoon, I drove south through the desert to Terlingua, an old ghost town, where I sat in the fresh spring sun. Perhaps because it is almost spring in New York, the warmth of the air registered as the augur of a new stage of mourning. It was as if I had been coaxed out of a dark room after a long illness. I watched a band play songs to a haphazard group of people who, for one reason or another, had been drawn down to this borderland and its arid emptiness. A group of girls lazily Hula-hooped in the sun while a drunk older man from New Jersey, with the bluest, clearest eyes I have ever seen, razzed the musicians: "Yer not stopping yet, are ya, ye worthless sons of bitches? It's just gettin' goin'." Later he pulled up a chair next to me. He told me he was about to turn 74. This lent his desire for things not to end a new poignancy. Dogs wandered among the tables, and tourists paused to watch before walking to the general store, where they could buy souvenirs and spring water. Listening to the band sing about loss and love, I felt sad and wrung out, but this, too, was good, like the sun on my skin. A vital nutrient that had seeped away during the winter was being replenished.
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny. And this, too, I think, is why I am drawn to landscapes that juxtapose the minute and the splendor; the very contrast is expressive of what I felt. After the concert, I drove down along the Rio Grande, noting all the green that had sprouted up along the dry riverbed. Then I turned and went into Big Bend National Park—a majestic preserve. Here, as in Joshua Tree, you drive along roads and can see rolling, rocky desert for many, many miles. The sky is as open as can be. On the horizon, mountains loom like old gods. On a clear day, you can see so far you can actually detect the curvature of the earth, according to the National Park's literature. I wasn't sure I saw any curves, but it hardly mattered. Having my sense of smallness reflected back at me—having the geography mimic the puzzlement I carry within—made me feel more at home in a majesty outside of my comprehension. It also led me to wonder: How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it does matter, to me, and in this setting that felt natural, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural. The sheer sublimity of the landscape created room for the magnitude of my grief, while at the same time it helped me feel like a part—a small part—of a much larger creation. It was inclusive.
Being in the vast spaces while mourning made me think about religion. On New Year's Eve, I'd had dinner with a friend who had been through his share of ups and downs. I was telling him that I hadn't felt my mother leave the world, and he asked me if I believed in God. I told him that I did not know. "I can say existence is a mystery I don't understand or presume to pretend I do," I said. And I mentioned that over the past year, I had prayed in several moments of need, and had always felt better—as if something were coming back at me. He was quiet and then said, "I don't know if I believe in God. But I do believe in prayer." If you are a secular agnostic in America today, chances are you subscribe to a psychological framework for seeing the world. This framework places stress on individuality, on the unique psyche and its formation. I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection—wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.
I also want to find a way not to resent my suffering (though I do). It is hard to know what that way is, outside of the ethical framework of religion. Last fall, I copied out a passage from an interview with author Marilynne Robinson in an issue of the Paris Review. She is one of my favorite novelists; she is also Christian. The interviewer recalled Robinson once observing that Americans tend to avoid contemplating "larger issues." (Many mourners would agree.) Here is what Robinson said in response:
The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
To that, I can say: Amen. And it underscores why I have been drawn to the remote outdoors, to places largely untouched by telephone wires and TGI Fridays. I want to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life. It's a feeling I have even in New York, but traffic lights and honking cars and businessmen leaping over puddles can make it hard to let that eerie, weird knowledge in.
If you're angry about the AIG scandal or Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, check out what's happening to the infertile couples and surrogate mothers involved in a California womb brokerage. It's a familiar tale of vanishing funds and defaulted obligations. But this time, the potential loss is bigger than property. It's pregnancy.
Whose pregnancies are at stake? That's a tricky question. Through in vitro fertilization, a fetus can have two mothers: a genetic one and a gestational one. Last week, for example, we looked at a Japanese case in which a doctor mistakenly put one woman's embryo in another woman's uterus. Weeks later, the second woman was told of the error and aborted the pregnancy. The first woman wasn't told about anything for two and a half months.
That's what can happen when you separate pregnancy into two stages. One woman can abort another's offspring.
And that's not the only way it can happen. Thousands of women have hired themselves out as gestational surrogates. If you're the child's genetic mother, you can put a clause in the contract stipulating under what circumstances the surrogate can abort the pregnancy. But no court will enforce that clause, because you aren't the one who's pregnant. The surrogate is. She can choose abortion unilaterally. All you can do is stop paying her for carrying the child.
But what if it's the other way around? What if you stop paying her first? If you had hired her to sew booties for your kid, she could respond to your nonpayment by halting work on the booties. But her job wasn't to deliver booties. It was to deliver the kid. If she responds by halting work on the thing you've stopped paying for, that thing is your child.
Presumably, if you care enough about the baby to have hired a surrogate, you'll pay what you promised. But what if you don't control the payments? What if you delivered the money to a broker, and the broker lost, stole, or squandered it? You did your part, but the surrogate is no longer being paid. And she has every legal right to end the pregnancy.
That's the scenario unfolding in California. The victims are couples and surrogates who met through SurroGenesis, a company "dedicated to assisting infertile couples to have a baby through third-party assisted reproduction." Hiring a surrogate through the company is expensive, as you'll see from its long list of fees. But don't worry: The company offers to "arrange for opening of [a] trust account" that will cover your expenses. Specifically, according to the Los Angeles Times, its clients say "SurroGenesis recommended that prospective parents set up trust funds administered by the Michael Charles group," its partner company.
The parents handed over the money. From this, the companies were supposed to pay the surrogates. Now, the Times reports, payments have stopped. In fact, the New York Times adds, "SurroGenesis told clients on March 13 via e-mail that their money was gone. Lawyers say that as much as $2 million may be missing, with some couples losing as much as $90,000."
On one level, this looks like any other financial scandal. But the pregnancies add a whole new dimension. Around 70 people are affected. At least one pregnancy plan was reportedly suspended just before extracting the eggs that were to be used. In two other reported cases, the surrogates are in their third trimester. But what about the pregnancies in the middle—too late to call off the fertilization or implantation but not too late for abortion?
Some couples have managed to pay, out of their own funds, the monthly installments that the companies had promised to the surrogates. But others can't. Andrew Vorzimer, a lawyer involved in the case, says, "We've got couples in the midst of pregnancies with no ability to pay the surrogate."
Surrogates aren't mercenaries. But they do need to be paid for their sacrifices. With every week that passes, they endure more of pregnancy's burdens. They submit to exams, tests, and other procedures. They take on serious medical risks. They forgo activities that might harm the fetus. They lose the ability to commute to and work at other jobs. They have bills to pay. At least one abandoned surrogate says she has received an eviction notice.
If you stop paying your surrogate, she needs to quit and find another job, just like any other worker. But surrogacy isn't like any other job. The only way to quit a pregnancy is to abort it.
Vorzimer says none of the surrogates are quitting. Many "will not be reimbursed for their out-of-pocket expenses lost wages or even have their medical bills paid," he reports, but "every single one of them has committed to moving forward." That's a different attitude from the one at AIG, where undelivered bonuses are regarded as grounds for walking out. But when you're carrying a baby instead of a briefcase, the stakes are that much higher.
Update, March 24: I originally invited readers to contact Vorzimer if they wanted to help the surrogates complete their pregnancies rather than abort them. In an email this evening, Vorzimer clarified that "there are no situations in which a surrogate has elected to abort because of this financial scandal."
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. Are drones for sissies? 2. Turning cell phones into universal remotes. 3. Cell phones that let you see through walls.)
Two weeks ago, I fell asleep during the Idol results show, and when I woke up, everything was different. While I was snoozing, Anoop Desai had become the first 13th finalist and the judges had claimed the right to rescue a contestant from elimination. It's a twist whose significance has since been hotly debated online: Is it unfair? Is it un-American? Is it May 19 yet? What it is, in any case, is a very big deal, because the entire premise of American Idol has centered on the feeling of power (real or imagined) in the viewers' hands. The new order shifts the balance more obviously toward the judges, whose ranks have swelled this season to include a second and less weepy female presence in Kara DioGuardi, and toward the producers, who are, literally, running the show. It's a jarring reminder that Idol's version of democracy, as I've noted here before, camouflages consumer choice as democratic voice. No matter how furiously you vote on your phone, your other phone, and your boyfriend's phone (what? I only have two phones!), the industry is ultimately a marketplace, not a polling place.
It's Idol's adaptability in the changing market that keeps it at the top of the Nielsen ratings in its eighth season (though President Obama's Tuesday address beat last week's Idol numbers). The show owes much of its success to the institutions that came before, including, of course, the inspiration for this week's theme: Motown. Motown's been my favorite Idol theme since the Funk Brothers (RIP Uriel Jones) jammed with the finalists back in Season 3. It's not just because I like the music, though. The structure of Idol eerily parallels Berry Gordy's Motor Town "assembly line," as Ryan called it last night, in some important ways. Just as Gordy thoroughly managed his artists, so co-creators Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell manage theirs, with Fuller calling their franchise "one-stop shopping" for singers—they only need to deal with one company, whereas under typical contracts, different aspects of an artist's career might be handled by a record label and 10 different agents and managers, all paid separately. And Motown and the Fox-hosted American Idol also share a concern with family values, and the equal-parts idealist and capitalist goal of racially integrated music that everyone can buy. (And that everyone can sing, too, as Adam Lambert, looking very spookily like Elvis, so brilliantly demonstrated on Wednesday.) Motown couldn't have become what it did without Gordy's iron hold on the reins, so maybe the Idol producers' recent rule changes are a way to hang onto that kind of strict and profitable management.
There's a new dynamic between the viewers and the judges now, too. That relationship has always been contentious ("… could Simon sway the vote?"; "But America showed Simon they were in control"), and when at some point America makes a decision only to have it revoked, the snit is going to hit the fans. We know from past experience that we do not like our voting results overruled. When will the Fantastic Four use their newfound deus ex machina device? Not yet. It isn't that Alexis Grace, who got kicked off last week, was not good enough to stay; it's just that you don't want to use up your judging ammo before the battle's begun, and, besides, the two-tone and/or pink-haired are among the first to go every season. (The hair of adorable Allison Iraheta, who is still with us, is definitely red! It's red!) No, the show will always go for the drama. I'm betting the veto will come into play around the Top 4 or 5, when fans and contestants are at their most anxious, when the sudden reversal of Idol fortune often happens, and when Lil Rounds will inevitably but somehow shockingly be sent home instead of wobbly Megan Joy.
Speaking of gods and machines, I've been thinking that, in the end, American Idol is every bit as much about religion and politics as the late, celebrated Battlestar Galactica series. We tend to forget Idol's metaphorical power because of its genre, but then again, isn't "reality TV" just another name for "science fiction?" At any rate, I've heard the phrase "the judges' save" so often in the past two weeks that I'm about ready to stand up and shout "Amen!" By the end of Season 8, someone will be saved (and that's very different from Ryan's intoning weekly "sit down, you're safe"). I don't need to hear Kara attribute Allison Iraheta's considerable talent to God, or Michael Sarver declare his intention to "take it to church," to remember that the Idol competition—like any American election—has to do with faith on many levels. The producers have to believe in the salability of their casting choices, the singers have to believe in their American Dreams, and the viewers have to believe their votes matter. (Plus, we are expected to suspend disbelief during the lip-synced group numbers.) Bringing God into the equation just adds a new dimension to the idea of television's "Powers that Be."
But, seriously, the judges are already drunk with power (at least, I think that's power). Do they really need the extra shot? Then again, when the group number tonight is almost certainly "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" for the 8,000th time, I know I will.
To survive, everyone needs to have a place to be and to sleep, eat, and, let's face it, go to the bathroom. For most of us, that place is the home. As rising unemployment pushes more people out of their houses and apartments, however, and growing numbers of Americans cannot find a place to perform these essential functions legally, they will have little choice but to break the law. And so some of them are turning to a strategy that has cropped up repeatedly in American history—squatting. Governments are sometimes tempted to respond to a spike in this form of outlaw residency by simply forcing squatters out. The better strategy, however is to treat squatting as a symptom of a simultaneous failure of both the market and the government. Viewed in this light, an outbreak of squatting is a sign that governments should change their housing policies to make it easier for poor people to find the housing they need—as law-abiders instead of renegades.
Squatting, or unlawfully occupying and making use of land that belongs to someone else, tends to emerge when poverty and homelessness intersect with absentee ownership. It was widespread on the frontier of the 19th-century West, where settlers who couldn't afford to purchase land at market prices often simply occupied land owned by Eastern speculators (as well as land owned by the federal government and by Native American tribes).
From the point of view of local officials, this was a win-win, of a sort. Far-away owners were more interested in free-riding on rising property values, and flipping their land, than in developing it productively. So they resisted paying property taxes or investing in infrastructure. As a result, governments in the West were happy to lend squatters a hand in their efforts to get property out of the speculators' hands. Local governments frequently made it easier for squatters to obtain title through the legal doctrine of adverse possession (sometimes colloquially called "squatters rights")—for example, by shortening the time period required for squatting to mature into ownership. Ultimately, even the federal government joined in. After years of using the Army to chase squatters off its lands, Congress decided to create a legal avenue for settlers without money to become landowners: the 1862 Homestead Act.
A century later, in the 1970s, squatting went urban. In city after city, the market for urban housing collapsed amid a toxic (and self-reinforcing) brew of riots, redlining, and the flight of the white middle class to the suburbs. City governments acquired thousands of vacant units from owners who had fallen behind on their property taxes. Rather than turning these properties over to remaining low-income residents searching for affordable housing, many cities sought to auction them off to speculators, who in turn frequently fell behind on their own tax payments. In the meantime, the vacant buildings became magnets for crime and illegal dumping. In response, groups of squatters—backed by community organizations like ACORN—began to take over city-owned, vacant housing. Many city governments cracked down on the squatters, but others took a more measured approach, coming up with programs whereby urban "homesteaders" could acquire vacant housing through "sweat equity."
As the current recession picks up speed, we are again confronted with the ingredients for a squatting boom. Unemployment is closing in on double digits nationally, and homelessness is on the rise. Between late 2007 and late 2008, the number of families presenting themselves at homeless shelters in New York City increased by 40 percent. In Massachusetts during the same period, the statewide increase was more than 30 percent. At the same time, housing vacancy rates are at all-time highs. According to the Census Bureau, about 15 percent of housing units in the United States were vacant during the last quarter of 2008. That's 19 million homes sitting idle, largely in the hands of banks. The difference between the 1970s and today is that the crisis last time was focused on the urban centers, while this time around the suburbs are the site of the greatest mismatch between people without homes and homes without occupants.
And so, the squatters are squatting. In Sacramento, Calif., a tent city has begun to sprawl out on land owned by a utility company on the banks of the Sacramento River. The cluster used to be a small homeless camp but has grown in recent months to several hundred residents, an increasing number of whom the Los Angeles Times calls "recession victims." In Miami, where the foreclosure crisis has hit particularly hard, a group of families recently moved into foreclosed properties with the help of the advocacy group Take Back the Land. In Minneapolis, another group, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, recently moved a dozen families into foreclosed housing.
So far, local governments have split over how to handle the influx. The Atlantic recently documented the efforts of officials in San Bernadino, Calif., to keep squatters out: One officer had removed an unemployed nurse and her family five times from different homes in the community. In other cities, meanwhile, officials have decided to look the other way. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, has even advised constituents who have been foreclosed to squat in their own homes by refusing to leave. Until he backtracked after negative publicity, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson had considered making that city's tent encampment permanent and providing its residents with utility services.
But these ad-hoc reactions aren't really the answer. Squatting can be dangerous for squatters and can, depending on the circumstances, harm neighboring property owners by driving down property values, as neighbors of the Sacramento tent city have complained. At the same time, some of the danger and harm of squatting results from ill-advised efforts to keep them out, and squatters who take over boarded-up housing might actually improve neighborhood conditions and increase property values. Cities should therefore resist the temptation to respond to an increase in squatting by simply ratcheting up enforcement. Instead, governments should attack the problem on both the supply and the demand side.
On the supply side, local governments should penalize owners who stockpile vacant housing, perhaps by imposing increased property tax rates on properties left vacant, and by moving aggressively to seize vacant properties when the owners fall behind on paying those taxes. On the demand side, governments should expand homesteading programs that permit and help low-income people to take over vacant housing—but only after it finds its way into city hands.
To be sure, these programs were only marginally successful in the 1970s, in part because of lack of funding, but also because of the difficulty of restoring abandoned urban properties to habitable condition. The housing that is becoming vacant during the current downturn, by contrast, is relatively new and should be easier for homesteaders to repair. The federal government should also move quickly to protect those in financial trouble from foreclosure and eviction by requiring foreclosing banks (many of which are themselves receiving taxpayer bailouts) to rent out foreclosed homes to their former owners at fair market value. In fact, as this letter to the editor in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday correctly observed, allowing owners to remain as renters in their foreclosed homes helps safeguard the value of the houses—which is good for the occupants, good for the banks, and good for the housing market as a whole.
The sudden increase in squatting shows that the housing market that is out of kilter. The solution is not to chase squatters off, but to bring the market back into balance by helping them find a place to call home.
Tim Geithner's plan to remove toxic assets from the books of crippled financial institutions is receiving mixed reviews. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the plan "amounts to robbery of the American people. I don't think it's going to work because I think there'll be a lot of anger about putting the losses so much on the shoulder of the American taxpayer." (Wouldn't you like to see the cage match between outside Democratic genius economist skeptics such as Stiglitz and Paul Krugman and inside Democratic genius economist promoters such as Larry Summers?)
The Geithner plan is designed to benefit professional investors: It provides them with lots of easy credit, limits their losses, and allows them to reap a disproportionate chunk of the benefits if the investments pan out. This will be a boon to outfits such as the Blackstone Group and big hedge funds. But it will not be much of a boon to you, and I don't mean that in the sense that taxpayers are assuming too much liability. I mean that you, and I, and other small-account holders have no easy way to participate in the plan, and that's a shame.
The design of the Geithner plan reinforces the notion that there are two sets of rules in the market, one for the really big players (matching investments, generous loans) and another for small investors and homeowners (expensive bailouts and foreclosure).
If we taxpayers are going to be financing something close to guaranteed returns for hedge funds and private-equity firms, why can't we get in on the sweet deal that's being offered to Wall Street? Why can't we buy the distressed assets the same way hedge funds will? If we think creatively, we can find a way to enable this.
As Matt Yglesias points out, at least part of the Geithner plan envisions the participation of mom-and-pop investors. The fact sheet says that for the "legacy loan" program, the less-leveraged component aimed at encouraging investors to buy loans from banks, "the participation of individual investors, pension plans, insurance companies and other long-term investors is particularly encouraged." But the "legacy securities" program, the more-leveraged version aimed at encouraging investors to buy mortgage-backed securities and other instruments from banks, does not mention allowing individual investors to participate.
Given the size of the assets involved and the structure of the investment-management industry, it's likely that only wealthy institutions and institutions that serve only wealthy individuals—hedge funds, private-equity firms, etc.—will be bidding on these distressed assets. Individual investors generally don't have the tools to analyze the securities and assets for sale. Banks such as Citi will be eager to sell off their junky assets in chunks of $50 million, not in chunks of $5,000. Bailouts and the unwinding of bubbles are necessarily wholesale operations, not retail ones.
But it wouldn't be hard to arrange for small-fry investors to participate in the bailout. The government could partner with investment-management firms—especially well-regarded investment-management firms such as Vanguard and TIAA-CREF—to create mutual-fundlike vehicles in which individuals could invest as little as a few hundred dollars in the effort to stabilize the banking system. The feds could even offer such an investment as a check-off on tax returns. Or we could present it as an allocation choice for federal employees' retirement accounts. Legacy loans and legacy assets could be offered as an option for state-sponsored 529 college savings programs, in which investors typically commit to lengthy holding periods. Or they could be made part of the universal savings accounts that Obama supports.
And if the private-equity or hedge-fund industry had an ounce of PR savvy—a really big if—it would help individuals make similar investments while waiving the management and incentive fees.
Yes, there's risk involved. And there is something circular about this arrangement. We'd be lending money to ourselves to buy stuff that the government would probably end up owning anyway if we didn't buy it. But I'd rather lend my tax dollars to help you, dear reader, profit from the financial disaster than lend them to Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwartzman to help him profit from it.
What to think of the latest plan to get crummy mortgage-related assets off the books of large financial institutions? Two of the economists whose views I most respect differ widely on it. Paul Krugman hates it. Brad DeLong is more optimistic. The stock market, which is a poor barometer of public policy, totally loves it. In its wisdom, Wall Street could easily decide tomorrow, or next month, that it hates the plan. That's been the pattern for the last six months of bailouts—excitement and exuberance that the cavalry is about to arrive followed by disappointment that it's armed with pop guns.
We should sympathize with the dilemma the Treasury Department faces in trying to clean up this mess. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said last week: "Many banks in this country took too much risk, but the risk now to the economy as a whole is that you take too little risk." (Moneybox made a similar point.) But who is taking the risk? And who stands to reap the rewards? The Treasury acknowledges that private investors will be subsidized to take on the ownership of what it's calling "legacy loans" and "legacy securities." (If these horrific securities are legacy loans, then the funeral industry should reclassify corpses as "legacy bodies.") The Treasury cites as an example a loan valued by a bank at $100 that is sold for $84. In that instance, the private investor and the government would each put in $6, and the investor would borrow the other $72 from the government. If you're keeping score at home, it means the private investor would put in 7 percent of the cash but would receive a much higher percentage of the profits.
The plan raises the disturbing question: Where the hell are the capitalists? Where are all the people who are willing to put their own money, and that of people willing to lend them cash, at risk in pursuit of profit? Why are Wall Street's tough guys such a bunch of girly men? The Geithner plan assumes that Wall Street's bravest investors won't spend a penny or borrow unless the government is willing to cover losses, make loans, and give away extra profits. It assumes, in short, that these great businesspeople are afraid to do business.
Dislocations create opportunities for investors with the courage to jump in and the vision to extend their investment horizon beyond a year or two. Many fortunes were made by purchasing assets from the Resolution Trust Corp., the agency formed to handle the leftovers from the savings-and-loans debacle. After the junk-bond market crashed in the early 1990s, investors deploying new pools of capital jumped in, purchased the bonds, and used them to acquire control of companies—a bet that paid off handsomely. Earlier this decade, Warren Buffett and others pounced on telecommunications and energy-trading companies that had become impaired.
The current environment should be a great moment for vulture investors. We've just gone through the mother of all dislocations when it comes to debt. In fact, the New York Times reports, several name-brand firms are plunging into distressed debt. But while these firms have plenty of cash, and (limited) access to other people's money, they won't wade into the mortgage morass—without something like a guaranteed return.
Yes, the market for these assets isn't functioning properly. But improperly functioning markets are a feature of life. Just as there's always a bull market somewhere, there's always a market in which something is significantly underpriced because of macroeconomic, geopolitical, or industry-specific issues.
There may be good reasons why capitalists aren't yet lining up to buy discounted junk from banks. It could be that potential buyers have lost their nerve (although you can never lose money going long on the nerve of Wall Street operators). It could be that the prices at which sellers are willing to part with lousy "legacy securities" still aren't sufficiently low to make these trades worthwhile without major leverage. It could be that investors today can't fathom waiting a couple of years to get paid. It could be, as economist Mark Thoma suggests, that the combination of complex instruments and a totally FUBAR market makes these legacy assets simply uninvestable at any price.
Or it could be that Wall Street has lost its nerve. In this past decade, the controlling assumption of the financial-services industry was that you could have "wealth without risk." Now it seems to be that you can have "capitalism without capitalists."
The Big Money presents "Every Day I Read the Book," featuring Daniel Gross. Dan's guest today is William D. Cohan, author of the new book House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street.
Listen using our audio player below, or download the MP3.
Subscribe to the "Every Day I Read the Book Podcast" on iTunes.
There's hope yet for world cinema if an Iranian-American director can take the premise of an Iranian film, set it in North Carolina, cast the lead roles with an African fashion model and Elvis Presley's former bodyguard, and produce something utterly new and beautiful. Goodbye Solo (Roadside Attractions), the third film written and directed by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop) owes its basic story line to the 1997 Abbas Kiarostami film Taste of Cherry, but it's neither a straight-up remake, a parody, nor an homage. A film of great intelligence and quiet assurance, Goodbye Solo exhilarates without ever trafficking in easy uplift.
The wildly charismatic Souléymane Sy Savané plays Solo, a Senegalese cab driver in Winston-Salem, N.C., who's studying to become a flight attendant. One night he picks up William (Red West), a gruff, 70-year-old loner who's immune to Solo's good-natured banter. William wants only to be dropped off at a local cinema and picked up two hours later. On the way there, he offers Solo a curious deal: In a week's time, he wants to be driven to Blowing Rock, a peak overlooking a sheer drop-off, and left there. After all but admitting that he plans to leap to his death from the rock, William offers Solo $1,000 to set the date, no questions asked. Instead, Solo sets about insinuating himself into the old man's life and creating a friendship by fiat. He introduces William to his wife, Quiera (Carmen Leyva), and her 9-year-old daughter, Alex (Diane Franco Galindo); takes him out to shoot pool; and, when the pregnant Quiera throws him out after an argument, moves into William's motel room.
All the while, Solo is conducting a benevolent espionage mission: In an attempt to fathom the source of William's depression, he searches the old man's bags for family pictures and has his pills checked at a pharmacy to see if he's suffering from a terminal illness. Solo simply can't accept the notion of giving up on life; he's convinced that, once William realizes that at least one person truly cares about him, he'll reverse his plans. William, for his part, remains a mystery. He seems to be warming to Solo's generous overtures, but when he senses that his privacy is being invaded, he lashes out with unexpected savagery.
The relationship between these two men—one who's given up on life, another who's endlessly and miraculously resilient—could easily recall one of those "magical Negro" films, in which an isolated and grieving Caucasian is rescued from himself or herself by a spiritually grounded emissary from the Third World. (The Visitor and In America come to mind.) But Bahrani is too smart, and too compassionate, for that; his script, co-written with Bahareh Azmi, allows both characters their complexity, their contradictions, and ultimately, their privacy. We never learn just what in William's past has brought him to this point, nor why Solo's usually smiling face occasionally slackens into an expression of the purest sadness.
Goodbye Solo is as far as you can get from a tale of humanist redemption, but it's kept buoyant by Savané's embodiment of that rarest of things, a good (but not simple) man. Solo leads his immigrant working-class life with style and grace. This is a man who, as he, William, and young Alex are about to tuck into bologna sandwiches in their dump of a motel room, makes sure to wish them all, "Bon appétit." That graciousness extends to Bahrani's sense of place: The one-story brick houses and tobacco warehouses of Winston-Salem, where the director grew up, are filmed (by cinematographer Michael Simmonds) with dignity, never condescendingly milked for "local color."
The film's narrative suspense—will Solo drive William to that fateful appointment at Blowing Rock?—relies on a clunky visual device in which Solo repeatedly consults his calendar as the preset date approaches. ("Who runs their finger along a blank calendar page like that?" complained my viewing companion, who likes to obsess about these details.) Yet, if the will-he-or-won't-he setup has a whiff of contrivance to it, the climactic scene, set against a backdrop of natural grandeur worthy of King Lear, upends your every expectation.
Not to let any unnecessary ideology creep into a review of a fun animated movie, but let's get this out of the way up front: Monsters vs. Aliens (DreamWorks Animation) is a film for children with a female lead. She is not the love interest, or the helpmate, or the mom. Nor is she a princess, or princesslike. She does not marry a prince or a prince-manqué. She does not marry at all. She tries to get married, but she is struck by a meteor on her wedding day (typical!), which transforms her into an unmarriageable, world-saving, 49-foot-11-inch superfreak and—thank you, O bountiful movie gods—a Strong Female Protagonist. (Or, as my more skeptical viewing companion put it, "a strong female protagonist who just happens to be ultra-skinny with big boobs and a pneumatic butt, and who sometimes wears a catsuit." Touché.)
We can also think of saucer-eyed Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), aka Ginormica, as the majestic figure on the prow of the DreamWorks Animation galleon as it heads into uncharted waters: Starting with MvA, the studio will be making all of its films in 3-D, which means higher-priced tickets, added security against bootlegging, and—oh yeah—a more absorbing visual experience. (In this gamble, DreamWorks has good company: James Cameron's first post-Titanic narrative feature, December's outer-space quest Avatar, is in 3-D, and Pixar's forthcoming Up will open this year's Cannes festival in three dimensions.) Though it begins with a flinch-inducing game of paddleball and frequently arranges for characters to reach a hand into the audience, MvA for the most part stays out of your personal space; instead, the multilayered picture tends to have a gently immersive effect, akin to a stroll through the world's most expensive diorama.
The 3-D format also enhances the movie's retro-futurist spirit: Starting with its pulp-tastic title and the Soylent Green accents of its early scenes, MvA is a loving parody-homage to 1950s creature features like Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, The Fly, and The Blob. The newly gargantuan Susan—soon to be dumped by her insipid fiance (Paul Rudd) on grounds of excessive tallness—wakes up in a top-secret government facility, where she shares what looks like an airplane hangar with fellow "monsters" Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a bug/man; the Missing Link (Will Arnett), a 20,000-year-old ape/fish; the botched snack-food experiment B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a transparent, voracious blob the color of Vanish Drop-Ins; and the mute/scary/adorable 350-foot Insectosaurus. The incarcerated menagerie is under the supervision of General W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland), but not long after Susan arrives, they're all furloughed to fight the evil alien Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson), who wants to conquer Earth with clones of himself. (More homage: The deranged war-room encounters between the crusty general and the idiot president, played by Stephen Colbert, are a nod to Dr. Strangelove.)
What has often eluded DreamWorks ever since its first computer-animated film, Antz, back in 1998, is how to ensure the taller members of the audience are entertained without resorting to coarse double-entendre and pointless pop-culture referencing (the Shrek franchise was often guilty of both). That is to say that one suspects DreamWorks has long ached to make its very own Pixar movie, and with Monsters vs. Aliens, the studio finally succeeds. The characterizations are unusually rich for the DW brand: Arnett's Missing Link suggests a well-meaning lothario puzzling through a midlife crisis, and Rogen's literally brainless B.O.B. makes an endearing testament to impenetrable innocence and cheerful cooperation worthy of Ray Bolger or Anna Faris. MvA nails Pixar's gift for the glorious non sequitur (for example, the president's olive branch to Gallaxhar, which involves a certain deathless cornerstone of '80s synth-pop). But it also captures the offbeat sweetness, the unsentimental prizing of teamwork and loyalty, the wistful grace notes (viz., a depressed Susan plunking down dolefully on the awning of a gas station like it's a park bench). Even the inevitable let's-smash-stuff-up! interludes are weirdly heartwarming, as when Susan's monster buddies, due to a momentary miscommunication, start pulverizing a white picket fence at their ladyship's behest.
Right at its center, MvA contains the equivalent of a victory lap for the 3-D bandwagon, and an early front-runner for Action Sequence of the Year: Susan straps on two cars as ad-hoc roller skates and glides into a showdown—monstrous friends in tow—against Gallaxhar on the Golden Gate Bridge, as hundreds of terrified, tiny commuters run screaming from their cars. This epic set piece contains everything popcorn-movie-goers of all ages have ever asked for: a heretofore aimless character surprised and transformed by her own strength and bravery, a screen that swallows you up with gorgeous photorealist detail and comic bits of business, and above all else, the primal and eternal satisfactions of Crash-Wreck-Explode-Destroy. Like much of Monsters vs. Aliens, it feels almost as good as getting hit by a meteor.
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to ask.my.goodness@gmail.com, and Patty and Sandy will try to answer it.
Dear Patty and Sandy,
My church class was given the name of an 8-year-old girl who needed gifts for Christmas. When I delivered them, I was struck by the desperate need for more to be done than just dropping off a few gifts and leaving. A couple of us organized a group to go over and seal her windows. A plumber was paid to make repairs. Treatment was set up for a bug infestation. We have not given the mother money, but we have offered to pay for phone service and other specific items to help out. Being the realist that I am, I know that this woman may allow us to repair things and keep going on the self-destructive path she's on. I'm not interested in enabling poor behavior, but I also know that her children are innocent victims of their family circumstances. Have we done as much as we should, or is there something more we could do to help the kids without being taken advantage of by the mom?
Abby in South Carolina
Patty:
I believe that the primary way to help a needy family is by supporting the best social-service agencies in your area. However, I also agree that sometimes it can be great for a group to come together to provide direct service to an individual or family in need as you are doing with your friends. It can connect you to your shared values, make you aware of the needs in your own community, and lead to a deeper understanding of the issues and the people you wish to serve.
At first review, nothing you are doing sounds like you are enabling the mom's problems, and you are certainly creating a safer environment for these kids. I think what you are doing is sound and compassionate. If the rest of your class doesn't agree, why not sit down together and write out a few giving guidelines you want to follow on any further projects and, as long as you can find ways to help this family within those guidelines, continue on?
I realize you and your classmates have standards for the way you believe people should live—but I caution you about imposing those standards as a requirement for your giving. A poster next to my desk as I type this that has a quote from an Aboriginal activist group: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." I have returned to that quote hundreds of times in the past decade as I examined my own giving practices.
I encourage you to keep pursuing your own service plan, but check your approach occasionally against this quote to ensure you're on the right track.
Sandy:
It sounds like you have the very best intentions, Abby, but I disagree with my mom on this one. With your current setup (identifying, coordinating, and paying for the fixes), I think you may be enabling the mom's problems without providing much long-term benefit. I say keep helping only if you can take the time to work with her to help identify and meet her basic needs. If you don't feel that you have the time or the skills, acknowledge that and try to put her in touch with someone who can.
If you want to help this family and you have the time to do it right, I would start by sitting down with her and making a list of the issues that she thinks need to be addressed and help her to match those needs to service efforts in your own community.
You don't discuss her work situation, but if she's currently out of work and wants to change that, help her identify skills that she could strengthen through job training courses. If child care is an obstacle, help her get set up for subsidized child care so that she can take those courses. Find out whether she is eligible for the South Carolina Family Independence Program or low-income phone assistance to help her pay her phone bill on her own. The Family Service Center of South Carolina looks like a great resource. Even if they don't have a center in your town, they may be able to point you in the right direction for statewide services.
If she's been working with community agencies, she may already have these resources, and if she isn't choosing to use them, you certainly can't make her. At that point, you have to decide what you're willing to do for the children. Maybe it's buying their back-to-school necessities, maybe it's bringing a box of groceries to their house once a week, but I don't think you should commit yourself to paying for her phone service or any other long-term aid. There are government and community resources to cover exactly these needs, and while they aren't always perfect, in the long run it will be more sustainable to have her working within the system than receiving handouts from a benefactor, no matter how well-intentioned.
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to ask.my.goodness@gmail.com and Patty and Sandy will try to answer it.
In our ongoing effort to do better ourselves, we're donating 25 percent of the proceeds from this column to ONE.org—an organization committed to raising public awareness about the issues of global poverty, hunger, and disease and the efforts to fight such problems in the world's poorest countries.
Newsweek, March 30
The cover package is a series of takes on the benefits and dangers of "populist rage." The introduction takes a historical tour of populism, which began in the late 19th century as citizens from small towns and mining centers targeted "economic tycoons who betrayed the public." Robert J. Samuelson praises the adaptability of American capitalism but warns that populist outrage could "veer into a vindictive retribution." Joel Kotkin argues that populism can raise powerful support for reform and that the Obama administration hasn't used it enough against Wall Street. Slate columnist and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer says we should accept basic market realities and restore "logic, not anger" to the debate in Washington. … An article profiles Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, who argues that Western aid to Africa keeps the continent poor and oppressed. She urges celebrities to give up photo-op advocacy and focus on more constructive ways to help.
New York, March 30
The cover story scans President Obama's economic brain and reports that "it's not pretty at this moment." Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner botched his first presentation, "speaking slowly, swaying side to side," and the rest of the economic team mistakenly believes businesses are excited about their "turning the country into a socialist state." They also appear to be capitalizing on the crisis instead of solving it, using their array of rescue plans to advance Obama's policy agenda, when this "should be an all-hands-on-deck moment." … An article profiles Cara Muhlhahn, a New York midwife and home-birth activist who believes childbirth should be "more poetic than clinical." She operates without required licenses and avoids partnerships with hospitals to escape their restrictions. "I don't enjoy being an outlaw," she says, but she insists no one else respects the body's natural processes enough. Most of her happy customers agree.
The New Yorker, March 30
An article explores the torturous effects of solitary confinement—a slow psychological deterioration that happens to prisoners of war and common American criminals alike. The widespread use of isolation in U.S. prisons is a phenomenon of the past 20 years. "Supermax" prisons, designed for mass solitary confinement, now contain at least 25,000 inmates. Advocates say solitary confinement is the only way to contain violent prisoners, but studies show no drop in violence when the worst offenders are isolated. … An article examines the "environmental benefits of an economic decline" and wonders how to reignite the economy without burning up the time the recession has "put back on the carbon clock." Once the economy is "no longer teetering," our environmental success will come from policies that seem to take us back to our leaner times. … In a piece of fiction, Woody Allen imagines a Bernie Madoff seafood dinner through the eyes of two lobsters.
Weekly Standard, March 30
The cover story predicts that the financial crisis could destroy the EU, the union's "soft authoritarianism" having "left it peculiarly ill suited to weather the storm." EU voter turnout is low and displeasure is high, meaning any direction it takes will push its alienated electorate toward extremist politics on either side. Populist movements are gaining ground across Europe, and as the EU's members hang together against their own interest, the "wild men of the fringes" will see their numbers swell. It seems "disturbingly likely" that the union will realize, "too late, that there was something to be said for democracy after all." … An article sees in this year's New Jersey gubernatorial race the beginnings of a GOP comeback. Democrat incumbent John Corzine trails both likely Republican challengers, including Chris Christie, the state's former U.S. attorney. Christie is winning statewide appeal with his engaging style and message of reform.
Rolling Stone, April 2
The cover story follows the cast of Gossip Girl around New York, where they live in a bubble of glamour that sometimes resembles the lives of their privileged Upper East Side characters. The young stars take the opportunity to reiterate that the rumors brought up "in every interview"—that the girls hate one another, that the boys are gay—have no more weight than the hearsay on the show's titular gossip blog. The story wonders if the fabulous five might be the last few living the high life in Manhattan. … Matt Taibbi reviews the financial crisis and rails against megabanks for creating an "idiotic language" too convoluted for regulators to understand. The people trying to fix the mess are graduates of that same class, making the entire crisis a charade of ass-covering that the American people should be way angrier about than they are.
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Gail Mazur read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
.
For what seemed an infinite time there were nights
that were too long. We knew a little science, not enough,
some cosmology. We'd heard of dark matter, we'd been assured
although it's everywhere, it doesn't collide, it will never slam
into our planet, it somehow obeys a gentler law of gravity,
its particles move through each other. We'd begun to understand
it shouldn't frighten us that we were the universe's debris,
or that when we look up at the stars, we're really looking back.
It was hard to like what we knew. We wanted to live
in the present, but it was dark. Ignorance
was one of our consolations. The universe was expanding
at an accelerating rate, we'd been told we were not at its center,
that it had no center. And how look forward with hope,
if not by looking up? I told the others we ought to study
history again, history teaches us more than erasures,
more than diminutions, there'd be something for us there.
I also dared to say we could begin to work at things again,
to make things, that I thought the hours of light would lengthen,
that nature still works that way. We would have a future.
Up to then we'd been observing anniversaries only
of mistakes and catastrophes, the darkness seemed to
blanket, to contain our terrible shame. I don't know
if anyone listened to me, it doesn't matter. Gradually,
afternoons began seeping back. As I'd promised, the children
could walk home from school in the freshening light,
they seemed more playful, singing nonsensical songs
so marvelous catbirds wanted to mimic them. Why say anything,
why tell them the endless nights would return? Listen to them,
the name of a new leader they trust on their lips, O O O they chant,
and I hear like one struggling to wake from a mournful dream.
.
Barack Obama doesn't care much for cable news, but that doesn't mean his administration won't borrow one of its ideas. On Thursday Obama held the first-ever "online town hall," with questions—104,074 of them!—submitted by "real Americans"—92,933 of them!—and streamed live over the Internet. In form, it echoed CNN's YouTube debates from the presidential campaign. In concept, it mirrored the cable network's penchant for using marginal technological innovations—it was community moderated!—to make news out of reporting the news. Fortunately for America, no one showed up by hologram.
It was an effective expansion of the presidential bully pulpit and the latest in a wide-ranging White House effort to talk directly to people. It may be Obama's best gimmick yet—entertaining enough to get people to watch but also a risk-free platform for him to give a presentation of his policies.
Presidents are always trying to get around the traditional news filter. But it's not easy. Part of the difficulty is built-in: One of the goals of going around the media is to get coverage in the media. Holding town hall meetings is a popular trick, but if they're full of softball questions, they aren't newsworthy. Local news stations may cover them, which can be important during a campaign, but national attention is preferred when you're trying to sell the nation on your programs. George Bush held a flood of these anodyne serendipity-free town halls when selling his plan for Social Security, and they failed to galvanize public opinion.
Another way for a president to go around the traditional news filter is by putting his weekly address on YouTube. But the White House knows that after the second week, when the gimmick wears off, people tune out. It's not special enough.
So Obama's "online town hall" was a combination of these two strategies—and it actually works. It's just gimmicky enough for people to watch it online, if for no other reason than the quasi-populism of the question-and-answer session allows people to join in the fun of going around the news filter that many of them think is obsessed with trivialities. And yet the news filter can't let go: The cable channels carried the town hall live and reported on it extensively (expanding the audience). It was also very safe—the questions were picked by community vote, but anything out of the mainstream can be finessed out of the conversation. A lot of people asked about legalizing marijuana, for example, and Obama brushed the issue off with a joke. The online town hall also now sits on the White House Web site, where people can access it at any time.
The production values of the hourlong event were high. The East Room, where Obama had held his press conference earlier in the week, was transformed into the fanciest high school gym in America. Just as they did in the campaign, some sat on bleachers behind Obama, and the rest of the crowd sat in a circle with the president in the middle. The president was relaxed and at ease, pacing the carpet while he held a microphone in his hand. He took six questions from the Internet—including two video questions. He also took six questions from the live audience. The crowd was screened, so it was not a surprise when a nurse from the SEIU stood to ask a question.
Not all chance was ironed out of the event, though. The president got a little jokey with a teacher from Philadelphia, saying that he knew she knew some teachers who weren't very good at their jobs. He was talking about merit pay, but the woman he spoke to was not playing along. Whether she was tacitly agreeing with him and just trying not to show it, or genuinely uncomfortable, wasn't clear as he tried to get her to acknowledge that what he was saying was true. "You're not saying anything," said the president to laughter. "You're taking the Fifth."
Despite that brief rough patch, Obama was at his earnest best, giving long, explanatory answers without sounding pedantic. He's been getting ribbed for using a teleprompter recently, but there wasn't one in sight for the hour-plus show he put on. He answered questions with enough detail that it was clear he'd been read his briefing books. He talked about everything from the federal procurement procedures that bundle contracts to the advantages and disadvantages of single-payer health care plans.
Though Obama has been expanding his ways of "meeting people where they live," as one senior aide put it, he's hardly forgotten about the traditional media. He may not have called on members of the Washington Post or the New York Times at his last news conference, but he visited the Post's newsroom on the eve of his inauguration, and he gave the Times a lengthy interview aboard Air Force One. White House aides have a healthy appreciation for the reach of the three big television networks, which is why Obama sat down for an hour and a half with 60 Minutes last weekend and why he'll appear on Face the Nation this weekend. Obama may be going around the filter, but he's also using the filter as much as he can. One day, he might even go on a cable news channel.
The Republican alternative "budget" unveiled Thursday is getting ridiculed for what it lacks: numbers of any kind. But there's plenty to mock that's actually in the budget, too. Take the phrase "universal access to affordable health care," which the document uses no fewer than seven times.
Since when do Republicans use the word universal to describe their health care policies? And what—if not government-sponsored, single-payer, socialist health coverage—do they mean by it?
The formulation is not especially new—for either party. In 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton promised "guaranteed universal access" to health care. Gov. Bobby Jindal used the phrase in his response to President Obama's speech to Congress in February: "We stand for universal access to affordable health care coverage. What we oppose is universal government-run health care." Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah likewise tried to tease apart the "universal" from the "single-payer" at a policy breakfast in early March: "Republicans are coming to the understanding that their opposition to universal coverage is misplaced. ... Let's understand that when we say we cover everybody ... that is not a step toward a single-payer government-run system."
Still unclear? The budget itself supports "leveling the playing field" through "tax incentives." It proposes letting individuals shop for health plans across state lines and praises state-based solutions rather than national ones. And a spokeswoman for the House Republican Conference, asked whether it's possible to have universal access without a mandate, said: "Yes, by making health care universally affordable and leveling the tax code to give all taxpayers incentives to purchase it."
To review: GOP officials aren't exactly helpful. The document itself is scant on details (although, to be fair, more may emerge next week when the bill is voted on). And the spokeswoman simply rearranges the text of the document. So what, exactly, does the phrase "universal access to affordable health care" mean?
Let's give it a shot. The difference between the Republican "universal" and the Democratic "universal" is clearly in the word access. Under a Democratic universal health care plan, everyone is covered whether they like it or not. That can be enforced with an individual mandate—forcing people to buy insurance—or a tax levied on people who don't. Under a Republican plan, "universal access" means anyone can buy insurance if they want it, but they don't have to.
The problem is, "access" is a slippery concept. George W. Bush famously said that "people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room." By that definition, "universal access" already exists. (Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the "affordable" part. Emergency room visits cost a lot more for uninsured patients than for their would-be insurers.) In other cases, access means being able to visit a doctor who will accept your insurance policy. For example, 7 million people in California are enrolled in the state's Medi-Cal program, but more than half of the doctors don't accept the card. So even if you're technically covered, it doesn't mean you have access. Other times, there simply aren't enough doctors to go around.
But even that is not necessarily what Republicans mean by "access." More likely, they're suggesting that anyone who can't afford health care will be eligible for a tax credit—say, $5,000 a year—that will enable them to buy into an individualized plan. (That's not unlike John McCain's plan, except McCain would have eliminated tax incentives for employer-based health care.) You don't have to take advantage of the tax credit. In fact, many wouldn't. According to modeling by the RAND Corp., only 15 million of the 45 million uninsured Americans would become insured under such a plan. (That assumes that everyone who makes less than $100,000 is eligible.) So it probably wouldn't result in universal coverage, but it would allow them to claim that the plan offers universal access.
Even if the tax credit were high enough that everyone could afford coverage, access would still not be "universal." Insurers could continue to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. (Currently, five states require insurers to cover people no matter what.) Some patients would still struggle to find doctors who accept their coverage. Nor would it shrink the long waiting lists for those denied coverage to enter high-risk pools.
Policy aside, shoehorning the word universal into the GOP's health care pitch has the whiff of rebranding. Polls show that most Americans favor health care for all. Sixty-five percent of Americans think the government should "guarantee" health care. In 2003, a Washington Post poll found that 62 percent of Americans preferred universal health care to the current system. Even more than half of Republicans say that universal health coverage should be the right of every American, according to one poll.
Emphasizing "universal access" also lets the GOP sound equally ambitious while quietly reframing the debate. "By setting the bar at access, they're trying to define the problem in a way that the solution is something minor rather than something major," says Anthony Wright of Health Access California.
How does Barack Obama persuade people to be patient about their outrage over the ongoing bailout of Wall Street—while also persuading them to get impatient about long-term fiscal reforms that may not affect them for years?
This was the task of the president's second press conference, and it wasn't easy. Nothing is, as he reiterated. "By the time an issue reaches my desk, it's a hard issue," he said, echoing a sentiment his predecessor often voiced. "This is hard," Obama said of reducing the deficit, a point he returned to later: "I'm not going to lie to you. It's tough."
The president's other job at the press conference was to manage anger, so he continued his role as national therapist. He sympathized with people who wanted to vent their outrage at Wall Street excesses but also asked Americans not to "demonize every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit." (You imagine that he'd like to hand out one of these to everyone in America, since he is essentially asking Americans to bail out some people who behaved badly in order to avoid an even greater catastrophe.)
The president needs the nation to be on an even keel, because addressing the economic collapse is going to take time. The nation must get through the stress test of cleaning up the current economic mess with enough emotional energy left to embrace his argument for an ambitious budget. To help everyone calm down, Obama argued that slow and steady progress was being made. "That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come, as long as I am in this office," he said. "I'm a big believer in persistence."
Obama returned to the theme of togetherness to buy time. We will "travel that road as one people," he said in his opening remarks. "We are all in this together." Lovely sentiment, but the times seem to call for a stronger pitch. Why should people join together when bailouts are rewarding people who didn't act in the common interest? Among those being rescued are Wall Street bankers, AIG financial engineers, and even homeowners who didn't behave responsibly—and now the responsible citizens are bailing them out.
Obama may be popular enough to make the case. But to bring about collective action in this environment, Obama may have to return to a lesson he wrote about in Dreams From My Father: the power of self-interest in helping to create community. People often join together because it is obvious there is something in it for them. Rather than the "we're all in this together" pitch he gave at the press conference, he wrote that an appeal to self-interest "bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment."
On Tuesday, Obama didn't try to appeal to people's self-interest in supporting his budget policies, except to create a general sense of emergency. "This budget is inseparable from the recovery," he said before reiterating his argument that only through long-term investments in education, clean energy, and health care could the country build the foundation for a sustainable future.
Earlier in the day, it was obvious that Obama wouldn't get his full wish list: Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate budget committee, laid out the pared-back version of Obama's budget—the working document Congress will have to agree on. It was $600 billion smaller than Obama's budget over five years, and Conrad made it harder for Obama to achieve his goals on everything from health care reform to cutting taxes for the middle class to increasing funding for Pell Grants. Anticipating the difficulty he'll have with the White House and his colleagues, Conrad started his briefing with reporters by showing a blown-up picture of a dog he's adopting Saturday. "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog," said Conrad.
There was little mention of foreign affairs, and there were no questions about the bank bailout plan announced the day before, which suggests the plan was either a success or that reporters found it too complicated. There were also no questions about Obama's "embattled" treasury secretary, which would seem to affirm the White House's posture that the Geithner squall will blow over.
The president tires of people who want quick and easy answers, a point that became abundantly clear when he snapped ever so slightly at CNN's Ed Henry, who pressed him on why he hadn't shown outrage about the AIG bonuses more quickly. "Because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak," he said before calling on the next reporter. It was a flash of the kind of immediate outrage Henry had said was missing.
The much-discussed Obama kitchen garden seems very noble and well-intentioned (despite Michelle Obama's controversial outfit), and as an avid gardener, I was loving the whole project until I came across the following quote from an ecstatic Alice Waters:
"To have this sort of 'victory' garden, this message goes out that everyone can grow a garden and have free food." (Italics mine.)
Can someone please fire Alice Waters as the spokeswoman for vegetable gardens? What a load of chicken manure.
Gardens and the food they produce are anything but free, and to suggest otherwise is romantic pastoral nonsense. Anyone can grow herbs cheaply in a pot on the windowsill. But to produce a meaningful amount of food, you need land, a fence, beds, soil, tools, organic material, mulch, and the plants themselves. Those plants get thirsty, and even the nicest neighbors can't be counted on to irrigate the pumpkins conscientiously during your two-week vacation, and when they don't and everything withers, all you can do is say thanks and give them that bottle of Scotch anyway. I recently priced the installation of a timed irrigation system to address this very problem and the estimates ranged from $1,000 to $3,000. Fortunately, we may not need one, because we're not sure we can afford a vacation this summer.
It takes many, many hours of toil before you harvest enough "free" eggplant and bell peppers to make a bowl of ratatouille. Though I doubt the Obamas will experience much of this, gardening is incredibly messy, ruins your hands, wears holes in the knees of your jeans, ends up costing 40 times more than you think it will, sucks up whole weekends in a single gulp, takes over your dreams, and frequently breaks your heart.
So why garden? Because gardening is one of the joys of life. Peaceful and meditative, it's work that involves nurturing lovely, colorful creatures that never talk back or defile the rug. You proceed at your own pace in your own space while listening to the birds or your iPod or your kids, and, if you're lucky and keep after the weeds, you'll end up with a stir fry. When gardening ceases to be a labor of love, you might as well stop, because there are people who do this for a living and would appreciate your patronage in these dark days. They are called farmers.
That said, there are two homegrown vegetables that really do pay off and that are mysteriously absent from the Obamas' published garden plan. Where are the tomatoes (OK, it's a fruit; whatever) and fava beans? There's no vegetable more gratifying to cultivate than the fava. Throw a handful of seeds onto a gravel heap and five minutes later, you're harvesting giant green legumes. I'm guessing that the Obamas have steered clear because of the Hannibal Lecter jokes. But tomatoes? It's too soon yet to be setting out tomatoes, so maybe they'll be rotated in. A kitchen garden without juicy summer tomatoes is no kitchen garden at all.
But, of course, this isn't really a kitchen garden. No one in the Obama family is going to be standing on the South Lawn every humid July afternoon holding a hose. By Mrs. Obama's own admission, the White House vegetable patch will be tended mostly by the White House staff—which, in my view, makes it an organic demonstration farm that just happens to be located in the Obamas' backyard.
That's wonderful. It really is. If the Obamas' example inspires one little kid to eat a pea, or one tightly wound adult to discover the therapeutic pleasures of hoeing, or one urban school to find space for a little garden, it will have been worth it. But "free" food? This admirable, enviable vegetable garden doesn't point the way to a future of free, or even affordable, organic produce for all. It's not going to fix our national obesity epidemic. (Someone needs to tell Mrs. Obama to stop talking about her daughters' weight.) And it's about as attainable for the average American as the first lady's biceps.
Regardless of whether he stays, resigns, or is fired, there is universal agreement that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is "embattled." "Embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner's job is safe," the Washington Post reported after President Obama said he would not accept Geithner's resignation. Days earlier, the Huffington Post wrote that John McCain was defending "embattled Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner." News site Raw Story reported that both New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "stand by the embattled cabinet official." "The Treasury Secretary is now tagged constantly with that hard-won adjective," declared the Atlantic.
But what does it mean to be embattled, really? And does being embattled necessarily mean you'll lose your job?
Embattled is one of those words that creeps into news reports when a figure reaches a certain threshold of controversy. Neither meaningless nor particularly meaningful, it's a subjective term that, once used, seems to spread on its own until one of three things happens: The person resigns, is cleared of wrongdoing, or simply waits it out.
Normally, the catalyst that gains a person "embattled" status is a call for their resignation. The first time a news report called former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "embattled" was on March 15, 2007, when then-Sen. John Sununu demanded that Gonzales step down. Sen. Larry Craig first got pegged with the "E" word on Aug. 30, 2007, when Sen. Norm Coleman, Sen. John McCain, and Rep. Pete Hoekstra called for his resignation.
Embattlement can also evolve over time. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was "politically embattled" as early as September 2007, according to the Chicago Tribune, but that instance referred to a legislative fight, not selling seats. By May 2008, he was "increasingly embattled," per the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, thanks to his involvement in the Tony Rezko trial. By Dec. 11, when the FBI actually charged him with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery, he was embattled enough that Obama himself called for Blagojevich to quit.
Nor is being embattled specific to politicians. Larry Summers was "embattled" as president of Harvard for months before he announced that he would step down. University of Alabama basketball coach Mark Gottfried resigned in January after his team's shoddy record qualified him as "embattled." According to London-based site the Inquirer, the entire nation of Britain is embattled.
In the vast majority of cases—we haven't run the numbers, but we're confident about it—being dubbed "embattled" means you're on the way out. It can be fast: Rep. Mark Foley quit on the day his explicit IMs to underage teens emerged. Or it can be slow: Larry Craig sat out his term instead of resigning. Alberto Gonzales waited so long to resign that even Slate's Gonzometer gave up tracking his fall. But however long they hold out, the trajectory of the embattled is almost invariably downward.
Yet sometimes waiting does work. Usually, it's because some structural or constitutional obstacle gets in the way. Sen. Roland Burris' detractors, for example, eventually realized that if he wouldn't leave on his own, they were legally unable to remove him. Other times, the official simply lets the mood pass. Sen. David Vitter went into hiding after his name was found on the phone list of a D.C. prostitution ring. He soon emerged, apologized, and returned to work. (He's up for re-election in 2010.) In these cases, "embattled" soon gives way to "controversial" or, in the best of all worlds, "iconoclastic." When embattled basketball coach Bobby Knight was fired from Indiana University, he took a job at Texas Tech, were he was merely controversial. Now, in retirement, he is almost iconoclastic.
Then there's the rare case where the embattled official does something so popular—or so distracting—that memories of battles past are washed away. President Bill Clinton chose the day of Monica Lewinsky's grand-jury testimony to bomb terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan. When he left office, his 65 percent approval rating was the highest of any outgoing president since World War II. Likewise, some have argued that John McCain's crusade for ethics reform has been atonement for past mistakes.
It's unclear which category Geithner falls into. He has a strong defender in Obama, who has popularity to spare. He has not violated any laws. And his resignation would have a high cost, which is to his advantage: If Geithner stepped down under a cloud, that could send investor confidence—and thus the markets—into the ground.
But Geithner may already be recovering, as the announcement of Treasury's "toxic assets" plan on Monday sent the Dow soaring 500 points. (The Krugman, meanwhile, plummeted.) According to the New York Times, "Wall Street gave the government what amounted to a do-over for the administration and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner." It left out a word.
Although I've written four pieces since 2006 debunking the existence of "pharm parties," the press continues to assert that they're everywhere.
If you're arriving late to the dispute, a pharm (or "pharming") party is a drug bacchanalia in which teenagers meet up to dump the pills they've pilfered from their parents' medicine cabinets into a collective bowl. Next, they dig into the heap, gulping the drugs at random. (See my June 15, 2006; June 19, 2006; March 25, 2008; and March 26, 2008, columns for more.)
Although the pharm-party premise is ridiculous—no kid will toss a Vicodin into the bowl on the chance that he'll get a Tylenol in return—such august outlets as the Wall Street Journal and ABC News have given credence to them. Other publications have bestowed a tamer definition on pharm parties, describing them as barter sessions in which drug enthusiasts gather to swap pills.
None of my earlier pieces maintained that young people don't take pharmaceuticals for kicks. Nor have I ever asserted that today's kids don't trade pills. As long as there have been illicit drugs, young people have shared and traded them. It's my position—until I see proof running the other direction—that it's an urban myth that young people across the country are playing Russian roulette with stolen pills, a myth that can be traced back to the late 1960s, when the drug-bowl bashes were written up by a credulous press as "fruit salad parties."
To the best of my knowledge, only one reporter—Time magazine's Carolyn Banta—has written from inside a contemporary pharm party. In a July 24, 2005, piece, she hung with the kids who had gathered at a suburban New Jersey home to swap pharmaceuticals. There was no communal bowl, but Banta said that "two or three" of the 15 young people in attendance spontaneously described the event as a "pharming party" without any prompting. Where did the kids get the term? "My assumption is that they probably heard it from a popular culture reference," Banta told me.
Indeed, the meme has become so pervasive that Hollywood has latched onto it, producing pharm-party episodes of CSI: NY (2005), Boston Legal (May 2006), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2007), and Saving Grace (2009). Yet except for Banta's piece, none of the scores of pharm-party articles I've read over the last three years puts the phrase in the mouth of an attendee. It's always a law-enforcement officer or drug counselor or teacher or journalist peddling a wobbly pharm-party anecdote.
In recent months the Petoskey News-Review, the Las Vegas Sun, the Herald Bulletin (Anderson, Ind.), the Rapid City Journal (S.D.), the Oklahoman, the Salisbury Post (N.C.), the Long Island Press, the Caspar Journal, the Times & Transcript (New Brunswick, Canada), the Columbian (Vancouver, Wash.), the Reading Eagle (which also calls the drug mix a "fruit salad"), the Paducah Sun, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Charlotte Observer, and other newspapers have given publicity to pharm parties without visiting one.
The Oklahoman gets the closest to real drug action with its piece about a bust of a "pharm party." About 25 teenagers with an "assortment of muscle relaxers, tranquilizers and the painkillers morphine and OxyContin" were trading and taking the drugs. As the kids weren't making random withdrawals from a big bowl, was this a pharm party or just a well-supplied drug party? The Rapid City Journal comes in second with a story about a Sturgis, S.D., mother who got five years in prison for hosting a pharm party, but it wasn't an illicit potluck, so central to the pharm-party myth. Mom merely gave her 17-year-old son alcohol, cough medicine, and oxycodone, which he then shared with his friends.
Obviously, parents should worry about their kids taking drugs, but those worries should be proportional to their children's behavior and evidence, and not press hysteria and TV melodrama. As the highly regarded Monitoring the Future survey (PDF) shows, illicit drug use is down among high-schoolers.
The worst thing about the pharm-party meme is the way that newspapers have placed into wide circulation the idea that a rare-to-nonexistent practice is actually quite common. Every time a newspaper lectures its readers about the pharm-party menace, it presents a deadly challenge to that kid out there who is looking to test himself against something dangerous. If and when pharm parties really start happening, I'll know whom to blame.
******
I read all e-mails and respond to most. That said, don't think you're special because you've lost a friend or a family member to drugs. Many of us have. Send e-mail—especially sightings of pharm-party coverage—to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Hither, I Twitter. Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type meme in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
This month the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to study the potential of body odor as a means of identifying criminals and figuring out when they're lying. The work will expand on basic research into the chemistry of the so-called human "odorprint," which scientists say is as distinct as DNA. At first whiff, the notion that individual B.O. is as special as a snowflake sounds like a rotten joke. But body odor has proved its value as a biometric for seven centuries, ever since man first started hunting bad guys with the original B.O. detector: the bloodhound.
While dogs certainly deserve a long scratch behind the ears for clueing us in to the odorprint, their days as our elite odor gumshoes may be numbered. (Canines are not as reliable as we once thought: Although the best can match scents with 85 percent accuracy, poorly trained or feeble-nosed dogs may do no better than chance.) Now scientists are figuring out their own, more accurate ways to scrutinize an odorprint. Research on electronic noses may also reveal secrets about how humans recognize each other by B.O. We know, for example, that mothers can pick out their babies by smell, and babies their mothers. Scientists call this the "armpit effect" and suspect that many other animals recognize kin by comparing body odors. This got me wondering: Could the techniques of modern B.O. analysis be used like DNA testing to reconstruct family relationships from drops of sweat? Could this analysis work on my own family? I asked one of the top researchers in the field of criminal odorprinting to help me find out.
Florida International University chemist Kenneth Furton studies the smells that might be of greatest use in a crime investigation. These, he says, are the ones that come from the hands. (Murderers rarely wield weapons in their underarms.) For the last five years, Furton has been cataloging the many chemicals that compose hand scent, including odoriferous acids, alcohols, aldehydes, hydrocarbons, esters, ketones, and nitrogen-containing compounds.
It's a rich brew, but hardly the rankest in the human odor-sphere. Hands don't contain apocrine glands, the funky B.O. factories that reside in the armpit and groin and broadcast sexual status updates. But they do have tons of eccrine sweat glands, used for thermoregulation, and oil-producing sebaceous glands, which generate their own odor signatures. These aromas mix with volatiles from our dead skin cells and exhaled breath before wafting in a plume of body heat.
I challenged Furton to construct my family tree based only on data from our sweaty hands. He had never attempted such an analysis before and made no claim that it would be possible. Yet he agreed to give it a shot. I dragooned my mother, father, Uncle Merritt, and identical-twin first cousins Ricky and Johnny into the experiment.
Odor collection proceeded according to protocol in a pair of secure, television-equipped locations. In Virginia, my mother, father, and I meticulously washed our hands without soap and then waved them around until dry. Next, we rubbed our hands to lather them up with sweat and then clasped them around a piece of gauze. For 10 minutes, we held our hands before us, as if in prayer, while our B.O. impregnated the cloth and we watched Rachel Maddow. I am told that during odor collection in California, my uncle and cousins took in a crappy Golden State Warriors game. Three scent samples were obtained from each person and then shipped to Furton's grad student Davia Hudson in Florida, who ran them through a gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer. (Click here for a dendrogram of the data.)
The results were intriguing, though hardly Nobel-worthy. Hudson said our odor profiles were "very similar" but that there was "low reproducibility" among the samples collected from each individual, likely due to contamination. So she discarded one outlier from each subject. Even still, one of the "good" samples collected from my mother came up 94 percent similar to one from her nephew Johnny, which didn't make much sense. The two of them were closer in scent than Johnny and his identical-twin brother Ricky. (Twins should smell alike.)
Still, to my eyes the family odor tree that emerged smelled like home. According to the data, I shared my dad's aroma, with similar ratios of citrus and tallow that surely reflected our shared heritage chomping pork-rib sandwiches. The clones, Ricky and Johnny, were quite alike but for a burnt note that lingered around Ricky, perhaps a side effect of his weakness for Caramel Frappuccinos. In general, the males had similar odor profiles, with the exception of my uncle, who seemed to come from another B.O. planet. He excreted the rudest bouquet—subtly oily, pungent, and sweet—which jibed with behavioral data from the dinner table. The only person who showed a hint of similarity with him—in one sample—was his sister, my mother, who is, after all, more like him than she'd like to admit. (Click here for a chemical breakdown.)
The B.O. Wheel. Click here for details.
They say you are what you eat, and when it comes to B.O., it's true. Body odor can be heavily colored by diet and also by the fragrant beauty products that we use. For this reason, one of the biggest challenges faced by odorprint researchers is to ferret out which chemicals constitute the "primary odor"—the root B.O. bouillon that can't be altered by diet and perfume. When I ran the results of my family experiment past George Preti, a smell researcher whose odorprint work has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, his main criticism was that several of the odorants used to build my family tree were probably environmental. For example, my cousin Ricky and my uncle both had linalool on their hands, a ubiquitous fragrance compound used in soaps, shampoos, and detergents. But Preti conceded that the notion that I might smell more like my dad than my mom was not outlandish. Unlike genetics, he said, odor inheritance is "not a 50-50 mix."
It may not be surprising to learn that B.O. does indeed vary by gender—a recent study claimed that men smell like cheese while women smell of grapefruit or onions. It also reflects age: Preti's lab has found several odorants that increase with advancing years, such as the aldehyde nonanal. (This is not the molecule others have implicated in "old person smell.") There may even be racial differences in primary odors: Asians, for example, have fewer apocrine sweat glands than blacks or whites. In a new book about scent called Headspace, Amber Marks reports that in the 1990s a British electronic-nose company was approached by South African police and asked for the "odor signature" of black people. The company refused, but an employee told Marks that they could have derived such an ethnic odor-type if they'd tried.
If the prospect of a racial B.O. taxonomy gives you the willies, the history of smell discrimination offers no comfort. In the 19th century, Finns, Eskimos, Jews, and others were judged by vigilant European doctors to possess a characteristic unpleasant smell. (Asian docs thought Europeans were the foul ones.) Blacks were thought to be at greater risk of shark attack due to their "ammoniacal" odor. Blondes were said to smell "musky." The old, like "dry leaves." Lunatics, "fetid and penetrating." In 1829, a French scientist proposed a new smell-based forensic identification method but ran into problems discriminating dark-haired women from fair-haired men. Today we know these odor classes are absurd; humans can't even smell the difference between their own B.O. and that of a chimpanzee. But there are some broad patterns to B.O. flavor—for a visual representation, see this chart.
In any event, a new era of odor profiling may soon be upon us. Furton foresees a day when crime scene odor evidence might help cops establish a dossier: fiftysomething Irish-American male, wears Axe body spray, loves garlic. If cops had a suspect, they could trail him and covertly collect an odor sample using a scent capture contraption without touching him or asking permission.
While for centuries our B.O. obsession has focused on preventing its unwelcome trespass, today's worry may be in protecting our right to "odor privacy." For one thing, a body smell may convey private medical information: Both Preti and Furton are seeking the smell signatures of cancer and diabetes, and Furton is studying the odor differences between depressed and nondepressed individuals. Unlike DNA-rich blood or saliva, scent cannot be withheld from authorities because—alas—there is no "off button" for B.O. And, indeed, scent surveillance is already in use. In 2007, Der Spiegel reported that German authorities had collected scent samples from activists in advance of the G8 summit.
Privacy hurdles aside, the odor chemists' greatest challenge may be in overcoming our mistrust of smell. Odors can linger, sometimes for days, and they are invisible, so it can be hard to pin down their origins. An old grade-school maxim—"he who smelt it dealt it"—illustrates the risks in making accusations based on olfactory evidence. At this point, it's not clear that odor science has the tools to move past this folk wisdom.
New York readers: This one's for you. On Thursday evening, March 26, Slate is hosting a panel discussion about the future of good design, moderated by Adam Gopnik. The panelists will be potter and designer Jonathan Adler, architect and landscape architect Ahmad Sardar-Afkhami, and graphic designer and Pentagram partner Paula Scher. The subjects this distinguished bunch will discuss include how the economy is changing design, how the Internet is changing design, and how design is changing everything else. The first 25 Slate readers to respond to this posting will get two free tickets to the discussion.
If you'd like to attend, e-mail slatersvp@slate.com. If you're selected to get tickets, we'll send you further details on the whereabouts and time of this event. (Ticketholders are responsible for their own transportation to and from the event.) We hope to see you there.
There are two NCAA Tournaments every year. One takes place over the opening weekend, the two-round, 48-game feast. This is the one usually rife with upsets and dramatic buzzer-beaters, and when it isn't it gets labeled "boring" by the media and the fans. The other tournament, starting with Thursday's Sweet 16, is a playground for the big boys, with matchups between power programs stocked with NBA-ready prospects. History has shown that, despite the occasional exception like George Mason in 2006 or Davidson last year, the underdog from the first tournament doesn't fare well in the second.
Still, fans like to see a Cinderella or two show up at the ball, and this year's tournament has disappointed in that regard. For the first time ever, the top three seeds in each region advanced, and only one double-digit seed—No. 12 Arizona—made it through. How come this year has produced such seemingly dull results?
One answer is that actually, it hasn't been that dull. There were some excellent games the first weekend, although the best ones took place late at night, after a wearying day chock full of TV timeouts, reminders that President Obama would be interviewed on 60 Minutes, and Bill Raftery screaming "Onions!" after every big shot. The Siena-Ohio State and UCLA-VCU contests were particularly thrilling, but both ended close to midnight ET, well after the casual bracket-filler-outer had called it a day. Ronald Moore of Siena probably wanted to call it a day against the Buckeyes after missing nine of the 11 shots he had taken, including all four 3-pointers. But Moore then drilled a game-tying 3 at the end of overtime, and another with 3.9 seconds left to win the game in double OT. How's that not exciting?
It is true, though, that several low-seeded teams came tantalizingly close to knocking off a big guy then fell frustratingly short after letting late leads slip away. No. 16 seed East Tennessee State scored five points in eight seconds to close within two of top-seeded Pitt on Friday, resulting in fist-pumping players drunk on the idea of an upset. Then Kevin Tiggs overeagerly drove the lane into three defenders and turned it over. Pitt responded coolly, feeding star big man DeJuan Blair for a 3-point play, and Pitt was able to avoid becoming the first No. 1 ever to fall to a No. 16.
Siena, a team good enough to qualify as this season's Davidson or George Mason, followed its dramatic win over Ohio State with a 12-0 run late in the second half Sunday to take a shocking lead over No. 1 Louisville. Rick Pitino called timeout, the Dayton crowd was going bananas—the scene had all the makings of a historic upset. But over the next couple of minutes, Edwin Ubiles and Clarence Jackson of Siena missed hasty 3-pointers (Jackson's miss was particularly painful, coming on a fast break seconds after a steal), Friday's hero Moore missed a couple of tough jump shots, and battle-tested Big East power Louisville reeled off nine straight points and won the game.
So was it just bad luck that the little guys fell shy of knocking off Goliath this year? Or is there something different about this year's tournament that made an upset less likely? Watching the Siena and East Tennessee games, it was hard not to wonder whether the endlessly hyped mythology of the Cinderella has started to affect the players as well as the fans. Today's players know that draining a 3-pointer to drop a top seed, a la Bryce Drew, will be better remembered than nearly anything in college basketball except winning it all—a goal realistic for only a handful of teams each year. So perhaps it isn't surprising that when faced with a moment that has the potential for repeated replays every March, some kids ditch the disciplined play that brought them to the brink of upset. Had one or two of the teams just kept their focus late in the game, no one would be labeling this tournament "boring."
Of course, what was a gutsy, conscience-free shot by Ronald Moore on Friday was a hasty, forced shot on Sunday—the difference being that one went in and the other didn't. It's impossible to quantify the effect of previous upsets on this year's close calls. We can assess the NCAA's growing talent gap with more certainty. When the rule stating that players were not draft eligible until their high school graduating class had been out of school for a year took effect in 2006, it appeared to level the NCAA playing field. Experienced teams would seemingly have an edge over squads that are continually replacing "one and done" studs. But as 2008 finalists and '09 Sweet 16 teams Kansas and Memphis demonstrate, the powerhouse programs have thus far had no trouble reloading with premium athletes and have offset any lack of team chemistry with raw talent.
The mid-majors are also getting squeezed by the selection committee. This year, only four of the 34 at-large berths were given to schools outside the power conferences. Those slots are vitally important for the little guys, as they have an outsize effect on recruiting better players—witness Gonzaga's transition from cuddly mid-major to annual high seed. The big-conference stranglehold on the tournament further stratifies the haves and have-nots for the future. Things might only get even boringer.
What's more, season-long bracketology has resulted in a selection committee that may be too accurate for its own good. Yesterday's upset-laden tourneys may have been more about too-highly seeded clubs regressing to the mean or unfairly low-seeded teams performing to their actual ability. This year's avalanche of high seeds in the Sweet 16 is further evidence that Mike Slive and his committee might need to shake things up next time or risk putting fans to sleep. Perhaps the time allotted to choose the brackets should be reduced from several days to 45 minutes. Lightning round!
Another radical thought—with the Madness draining from March, perhaps it's time to contract the tourney. Until the mid-1970s, only the conference tournament winners made the "Big Dance," which then consisted of no more than 25 teams. What if tournament berths went to the regular-season champions of each conference? That would eliminate the mediocre teams that get hot for a weekend at the conference tournament and then gum up the works in the big show. There are 31 conferences, so the selection committee could halve their annual duty and pick only 17 more, for a total of 48. They could also bring back the first-round bye for the top 16 seeds—not that big a deal when you consider the top four seeds have lost only five games in the first round since 2006.
This way, the various Middle Valley State Techs that make the first rounds so compelling will have more of a fighting chance at upsets, as the lowest seed would face the fifth-best team in the region, rather than the best, in the first rounds. They then would have a game under their belts when it came time to play the elites, who took the first round off. Tightening the field would also eliminate many of the average teams who make the dance from the power conferences. That would help level the monetary playing field among the conferences, spreading out the payoffs for winning tourney games around the country. So maybe the same dozen schools wouldn't comprise the Final Four year in and year out. There's nothing as boring as that.
Hillary: The Movie: The critics rave.
"This film, which I saw—it is not a musical comedy."
—Justice Stephen Breyer
"As Justice Breyer said, it's not a musical comedy."
—Justice David Souter
In 2008, a conservative group called Citizens United produced Hillary: The Movie, a 90-minute documentary in which Hillary Clinton, then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, is variously described as "deceitful," "ruthless," and "cunning," as well as "dishonest," "reckless," a "congenital liar," and "not qualified as commander in chief." For ideological balance, Dick Morris says that "Hillary is the closest thing we have in America to a European socialist." The movie did not expressly urge voters to vote against her. It simply implied that friends don't let friends vote for evil people.
Citizens United released the film in six theaters and on DVD, actions not subject to federal regulation. But when they sought to distribute the film by paying $1.2 million to sell it through a video-on-demand service, the Federal Election Commission contended that the film was no different from the kind of "electioneering communication" regulated under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. That was the 2002 statute that tried to limit the influence of big money on elections. If subject to the constraints of McCain-Feingold, the film could not be financed by corporate treasuries or broadcast within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. The federal court of appeals agreed with the FEC, finding that the movie could be interpreted as nothing but an effort to "inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office." Citizens United appealed.
The question for the high court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is whether the film is more like a 90-minute version of one of those swift-boat ads or more like The Federalist—core political speech that warrants the highest level of constitutional protection. At oral argument this morning, the government—seemingly unafraid of the latter comparison—takes the position that in the right circumstances, even books can be banned under campaign finance laws. And that's when the justices start hyperventilating.
Former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson represents Citizens United, and because the justices had just screened the virulently anti-Clinton film, his claims that the movie simply "informs and educates" the public about important issues are generally met by stony silence. Nobody really thinks it is an episode of 60 Minutes. Olson does get the bunch hopping when he characterizes McCain-Feingold as "one of the most complicated, expensive, and incomprehensible regulatory regimes ever invented by the administrative state." Olson notes that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (which he accidentally calls "the Reporters Committee for the Right to Life") filed a brief on his side of the case urging that the Hillary movie "is indistinguishable from other news-media commentary." (Disclosure: I am on the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; I am still wait-listed for Reporters Committee for the Right to Life.)
Several of the justices seem bothered by Olson's claim that Hillary did not represent electioneering. "This sounds to me like campaign advocacy," insists Justice David Souter. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg adds, "If that isn't an appeal to voters, I can't imagine what is." To which Olson replies that the film is merely "a long discussion of the record, qualifications, history, and conduct of someone who is in the political arena, a person who already holds public office, who now holds a different public office, who, yes, at that point, Justice Souter, was running for office." But Justice Anthony Kennedy observes that a 90-minute attack ad is pretty much by definition more potent than a 30-second one: "[I]f we take this as a beginning point—that a short, 30-second campaign ad can be regulated—you want me to write an opinion and say, well, if it's 90 minutes, then that's different. It seems to me that you can make the argument that 90 minutes is much more powerful in support or in opposition to a candidate."
Olson seems to be of the view that a good way to peel off five votes at the court is by berating the justices about the general twirliness of the campaign finance laws, as evidenced by the fact that "since 2003, this court has issued something close to 500 pages of opinions … and 22 separate opinions from the Justices of this Court attempting to figure out what this statute means." A defensive Chief Justice John Roberts observes that the statute gives the court "mandatory appellate jurisdiction"—it has to hear these cases. A tetchy John Paul Stevens snaps: "And maybe those cases presented more difficult issues than this one!"
Note to Olson: Don't tell the justices they are too stupid to understand McCain-Feingold.
Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart rises to argue the case for the FEC. His job is to persuade the court that they can and should ban 90-minute attack ads. But when Justice Samuel Alito asks whether the government—if it can regulate documentaries—might also regulate a book containing "express advocacy" prior to an election, Stewart agrees that it might.
"That's pretty incredible," splutters Alito. "You think that if—if a book was published, a campaign biography that was the functional equivalent of express advocacy, that could be banned?" Not banned, clarifies Stewart. Congress could just "prohibit the use of corporate treasury funds" to publish it. Oh, Malcolm Stewart. Malcolm Stewart. With your Macbeth-y first name and your Macbeth-ier last name. You did not just say the government might engage in a teensy little bit of judicious, narrowly tailored book-banning, did you?
At this point, a horrified Anthony Kennedy gets even paler than his usual pale self: "Is it the Kindle where you can read a book? I take it that's from a satellite. So the existing statute would probably prohibit that under your view? … If this Kindle device where you can read a book which is campaign advocacy, within the 60- to 30-day period, if it comes from a satellite, it can be prohibited under the Constitution and perhaps under this statute?" Again Stewart clarifies that it wouldn't be banned, but a corporation could be barred from using its general treasury funds to publish such a book and would be required to publish it through a PAC. The chief justice seeks to clarify that this would be so even in a 500-page book with only one sentence that contained express advocacy. Stewart cheerfully agrees. The chief justice wonders whether this would apply even "to a sign held up in Lafayette Park saying vote for so-and-so." Stewart doesn't quite say no.
Justice Breyer keeps trying to shake Stewart over his head—like an Etch A Sketch—to erase the noxious image of government-sponsored book banning and get him to stop chatting about issues that are not before the court. But it's too late. Now Souter looks even paler than Kennedy.
For the past few years, the Roberts court has been slowing chipping away at McCain-Feingold, with Justices Roberts and Alito tapping on the brakes as Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas revved the motor. But it seems to me that all this talk of book banning and government regulation of signs in Lafayette Park is a pretty good way to get all five of them in the mood to run down yet more restrictions on political advertising. And maybe even back up and do it again.
Do you hate Facebook's new design? Do you find the home page too noisy, with important updates from your friends getting buried under a stream of banal comments from high-school classmates and other people you pity-friended? I bet you think the site's confusing, too. It used to be easy to get to people's photos and notes, but now you've got to click around to find anything. Are you at your wit's end?
I've got news for you: You'll get over it soon enough.
Though Facebook will probably tweak its new layout over the next few weeks—sites always tweak new designs—the giant social network is unlikely to revert to its former self. That's because it's banking on a tried-and-true axiom of the Web: People always hate when their favorite site is suddenly completely different. A lot of them threaten to quit. They're bluffing.
For readers who aren't among the angry horde, here's the back story: Over the last couple of weeks, Facebook revamped members' home pages in an effort to let people "share more information about what is happening with them," as founder Mark Zuckerberg put it. In the past, Facebook used a complex algorithm to round up your friends' recently added photos, notes, and status updates and compile them into a neat summary on your front page. But Facebook execs have lately become enamored of the microblogging service Twitter, where people share stuff with each other in real time. Earlier this month, I argued that, like many in Silicon Valley, Facebook was overestimating the importance of immediacy to its members; not everyone wants to see what their friends are doing as it's happening. The company didn't listen to me, and its new home page is essentially a Twitterized Facebook. Now, instead of a summary of what your friends have been up to in the last few hours, you get what Zuckerberg calls a "stream"—a continuously updated timeline that shows every little thing that someone in your network does.
Every time you refresh the front page, there's new stuff for you to read. Much of it isn't very interesting, and because the stream moves so quickly, the little that is interesting gets drowned out by items that aren't. Facebook allows you to block certain people's updates from appearing on your home page or to filter the stream according to your friends lists, but these options are too crude. You can't simply choose to hear a bit less from some people, or to say, I'd like to see Farhad's notes and photos, but not his incessant status updates. The effect is like being at a party of oversharers; every interesting conversation is interrupted by 10 people who'd love to tell you what they ate for breakfast.*
In a poll on the site, more than 1 million members—94 percent of respondents—say they can't stand the design. I voted against it, too. I don't necessarily want the old version back, but I think Facebook should look for a better balance between showing you what's immediate and showing you what's interesting. The bulk of the page should be reserved for what's happened over the last day, with only a small section displaying what's happening right now.
Still, I'm not very confident that my feelings are genuine. When a site as popular as Facebook makes a change as big as this, it's hard to know whether your immediate negative response really does reflect substantive concerns. As we flit about the Web every day, we get used to our favorite sites being laid out in a certain way. We develop habits for interacting with them, ways of moving the mouse or the keyboard that become so familiar they're etched in our muscle memory. Redesigns discombobulate us.
But eventually we adjust. Over the next few weeks, you'll probably grow increasingly comfortable with the new Facebook. You'll discover the path of least resistance to get to the stuff you like best, and you'll learn ways to tame the noise coming from everyone in your network. (Over time, you can expect Facebook to add more refined ways to filter what shows up.) Soon you'll also forget much of what you loved about the old site. In a month or two, the new Facebook will come to seem like home.
Don't believe me? Mark your calendar for some time in June. If you still hate the new design then—and if you can still remember what the old Facebook looked like—shoot me an e-mail.
How can I be so sure that you'll learn to like the redesign? Because you did the last two times Facebook did it. In 2006, Facebook added the original news feed to its site. (This was the slowly updated stream of what's happening with your friends that new redesign is replacing.) People hated it. They said the feed cluttered their home pages and violated their privacy. Zuckerberg responded with a blog post titled, "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." Facebook tweaked the feed a bit, but the redesign stuck. Zuckerberg's instinct was right on. In time, the news feed became Facebook's signature feature, the part of the site that everyone checked first. Last summer, Facebook redesigned its front page to give more weight to the news feed. Again, millions protested. But once more, people learned to love the new site—stats show members started using Facebook more often. On Friday, Gawker, citing an unnamed source, reported that Zuckerberg sent a memo to his staff telling them to ignore the latest cries because "the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers." That's not very politic, but if Zuckerberg did really say it, he was only describing recent history.
Indeed, learning to ignore readers is a necessary skill among people who design for the Web. In January, Jason Kottke redesigned his popular blog about "liberal arts 2.0." A few days after the new version launched, Kottke, who is careful and thoughtful about design, wrote a post describing people's reactions. Most of the readers he'd heard from didn't like it; many wanted him to bring back the old site. "This is exactly the reaction I expected, and it's heartening to learn that the old design struck such a chord with people," he wrote. He pointed out that people hated the old design when it was new, too. "All I'm asking is that you give it a little time."
Kottke's few hundred thousand readers might be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Facebook is in a different spot. It has nearly 200 million users, and each of them thinks of their page as something they should control. This suggests that Facebook should approach redesigns much more carefully. About a week before the new site went into effect, Facebook put up a short note preparing users for coming changes. That was insufficient notice. A better approach would have allowed people to choose between the new site and the old one for a while; this would have let the company get feedback on the new site and fix what people hated about it before it rolled it out to everyone. It would also have given users a chance to get used to the new design before it became the default view. (In fact, Facebook did this for its last redesign; it's baffling why it didn't do the same this time.)
Other big Web companies have taken this go-slow approach in their design shops. More than 300 million people around the world check in to Yahoo's front page every day. The company has spent months redesigning it. Yahoo relies heavily on "bucket testing," in which it randomly serves up potential new designs and monitors feedback. That process has given designers deep insight into what people want from a new site and how best to ease people into a new design. Google takes bucket testing to almost absurd lengths. The New York Times reported recently that in choosing the color of a single toolbar on one of its sites, Google served up pages with 41 different shades of blue to see which one people were most likely to click on. (One of Google's top designers recently quit in part over his displeasure with this strategy.)
When Slate redesigned its home page last fall, many readers wrote in to complain. Last week I e-mailed a handful of them to see if they still hated Slate's design. A couple of them said they still weren't big fans; most admitted they'd grown used to it and couldn't really recall the old site very well. But several said something I found interesting—that what had bothered them about the redesign wasn't exactly the change but the fact that the changes hadn't seemed necessary. Slate, like a lot of sites, hadn't explained well enough why it was making such sweeping changes.
"I'm a big believer in 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' " a reader named Barry Geisler told me. "The seemingly constant redesigning of Web sites needlessly frustrates the user for what appears to be very little gain. Yes, users adapt fairly quickly—so what? Is the new Facebook a richer, better experience this week over last week? Doubtful."
That's the main problem with Facebook's sudden redesign. The real reason Facebook implemented it is to compete with Twitter. So far, there's nothing in it for us.
Correction, March 25, 2009: This article originally stated that Facebook's new activity stream forces people to listen to conversations from everyone in their network; in fact, you can filter your stream according to groups of friends. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Sundays at 8 p.m. ET)—a beautifully shot, marvelously soporific, sporadically irksome miniseries that reads mostly as a pretense for a glamorous working vacation—airs, as they say, not on TV but on HBO. Unlike The Wire or The Sopranos or even a befuddled effort like the short-lived John From Cincinnati, this show has no vivid artistic ambitions, only transparent status-seeking aspirations. A prestige project, it's one of the network's excursions in hounding after industry esteem and dinner-party kudos at the expense of all else.
The director is Anthony Minghella, who previously helmed the wonderful Truly Madly Deeply, the riveting Talented Mr. Ripley, the inexcusable Cold Mountain, and—second only to Shakespeare in Love as the ultimate artsy-fartsy cachet-catcher of our time—The English Patient. The executive producers are Harvey Weinstein, Sydney Pollack, and Richard Curtis, famous as the screenwriter who inflected on an innocent public such crumpets as Love Actually and HBO's The Girl in the Café (seven Emmy nominations, one Humanitas Prize). Because both Pollack and Minghella died last year, it feels boorish to disparage Detective Agency, but let's give it a shot.
We shall begin with the matter of the source material, a dull series of middlebrow novels churned out by one Alexander McCall Smith. The most glaring of the many problems with the Detective Agency novels—or at least with the first of them, which is all I had the stamina to take—is that they are not detective novels. Because they concern the workings of a private investigator's office in Gaborone, Botswana, you might open the book with the idea that the heroine, Precious Ramotswe, will solve some proper mysteries, like Miss Marple with a headtie instead of a cloche.
Silly you. Ramotswe never takes a case that would tax Encyclopedia Brown. Hacking through the highly prosaic prose of the eponymous first installment, you find her accepting perhaps half a dozen major cases and developing a mildly clever way of resolving each. It's not about who done it but about how to catch 'em—exposing an adulterous husband by enticing him home, stealing a stolen car on behalf of its rightful owner—and the protagonist's expertise is not in deduction but in perception. She's The Mentalist with a different accent. The tag line for the show is, "Never underestimate a woman's intuition." Meanwhile, the rear cover of the tie-in edition boasts that more than 7 million readers have discovered the book. Can 7 million readers be wrong? Aren't they usually?
The novel features a lot of business about Ramotswe—a size 22, a natural nurturer, a mechanical earth-mother archetype—attending to her pot of redbush tea. The show picks up on this and, like the book, functions itself as a kind of tea cozy. On-screen, R&B singer Jill Scott reports for brewing duty in her first starring role. Considering that her lines include, "I want to do good with the time God has given me," she's perfectly fine. There exists a perennial complaint about the dearth of good parts for black actors in mainstream entertainment, and Detective Agency, to its credit, gets halfway toward remedying this imbalance; the casting agents offered a cornucopia of bad parts to black actors. Witness Anika Noni Rose, unsung for her excellence as the third of Bill Condon's Dreamgirls, doing what she can in the role of Ramotswe's secretary, a caricature of an uptight prig. I bailed on the show after its fourth hour and thus will never catch the inevitable scene where she pulls off her glasses and takes down her hair.
What does the show have to say about blackness? Nothing you need to hear. Where the book, consistently tepid, forgoes outright exoticism, the show dives headlong into a thoughtless brand of Africanism, presenting Ramotswe as not just an earth mother but a global mammy, just slightly. Though the book is primarily set in a city, a montage near the beginning of the miniseries gives us a lot of rhinos and giraffes and elephants, as if this were The Jungle Book's India or Busch Gardens' Dark Continent. This doesn't feel mindless, just unmindful, and the best way to honor its late creators is to look away from it.
The AIG scandal is getting ever-more disturbing. Goldman Sachs' public conference call explaining its trading relationship and exposure with AIG established, once again, that Goldman knows how to protect itself. According to Goldman, even if AIG had failed, Goldman's losses would have been minimal.
How did Goldman protect itself? Sensing AIG's weakening capital position through 2006 and 2007, Goldman demanded more collateral from AIG and covered outstanding risk with instruments from other firms.
But this raises two critical questions. The first is why $12.9 billion of taxpayer money went from AIG to Goldman. What risk—systemic or otherwise—was being covered? If Goldman wasn't going to suffer severe losses, why are taxpayers paying them off at 100 cents on the dollar? As I wrote earlier in the week, the real AIG scandal is that the company's trading partners are getting fully paid rather than taking a haircut.
Goldman's answer is that it was merely taking a commercial position—trying to avoid any losses at all on its AIG positions. I suppose we can hardly expect Goldman to reject government assistance in the form of pure cash that seems to have had no strings attached.
But what were the government officials possibly thinking? The only rationale for what we should call the "hidden conduit bailout" to AIG's trading partners is that the cascading effect of AIG's inability to pay would have been devastating. But Goldman has now said very clearly there would have been no cascade. Not even a ripple.
Is the same true of AIG's other counterparties, including several foreign banks? What examination of the impact of an AIG failure did federal officials undertake before deciding to spend countless billions bailing out AIG and its trading partners?
The government decision to bail out AIG was made after the private parties, supposedly at risk, had declined to structure a private series of investments that might have avoided the need for use of public money. Perhaps they knew the impact of an AIG default would be small, or perhaps they knew that the federal officials in the room would blink and ante up. In a post-Lehman moment when panic, not reason, was dominating the discussion, perhaps they figured they could walk away with extra billions—and, indeed, they did.
This issue cries out for immediate government inquiry. Maybe one or two of the more than two dozen government entities now beating their chests about bonuses can redirect their energies to this much larger issue confronting us: Who signed off on this $80 billion bailout—now approaching $200 billion—and why?
The second question, of course, is why Goldman was wise to AIG's declining position two years ago but nobody else appears to have known. There is always the operating premise that Goldman is better than the rest in the field, but where were the federal agencies that should have been taking a look at AIG's leverage situation and general financial health?
And were AIG's public statements accurate in revealing a decline? Or did Goldman, with its multiple trading relationships with AIG, get an early warning? This series of questions also demands immediate inquiry and resolution.
What continues to be fundamentally disappointing is that the "too big to fail" institutions continue to absorb enormous sums of taxpayer support without either demonstrating the genuine need for such support or altering their behavior after receiving it.
After getting $12.9 billion in what now seems to be a mere gift, has Goldman begun to lend in a way that will restore the credit markets? Were they asked to do so?
It is time the government realizes it has two simple options: tightly regulate entities that are too big to fail or break them up so they aren't.
I'm doing my best not to become a Kindle bore. When I catch myself evangelizing to someone who couldn't care less about the marvels of the 2.0 version of Amazon's reading machine—I can take a whole library on vacation! Adjust the type size! Peruse the morning paper without getting out of bed!—I pause and remember my boyhood friend Scott H., who loved showing off the capabilities of his state of-the-art stereo but had only four records because he wasn't really that into music.
So apologies in advance if I'm irksomely enthusiastic about my cool new literature delivery system. Like the early PCs, the Kindle 2 is a primitive tool. Like the Rocket e-book of 1999 (524 titles available!), it will surely draw chuckles a decade hence for its black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting, and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature. But however the technology and marketplace evolve, Jeff Bezos has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
Though the PC and the Internet taught us all to read on screens, they have not actually improved the experience of reading. I remember Bill Gates, in Slate's Microsoft years, mentioning in an interview that he read our webzine printed out—a tribute that underscored an inherent flaw. For all their advantages in creating and distributing texts, screens have compromised, rather than enhanced, the feeling of being transported into a writer's imaginative universe. You can't curl up with a laptop. Until now, Gutenberg's invention had yet to be surpassed as the best available technology for reading at length or for pleasure.
The Kindle is not better than a printed book in all situations. You wouldn't want to read an art book, or a picture book to your children on one, or take one into the tub (please). But for the past few weeks, I've done most of my recreational reading on the Kindle—David Grann's adventure yarn The Lost City of Z, Marilynne Robinson's novel Home, Slate, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times—and can honestly say I prefer it to inked paper. It provides a fundamentally better experience—and will surely produce a radically better one with coming iterations.
The notion that physical books are ending their lifecycle is upsetting to people who hold them to be synonymous with literature and terrifying to those who make their living within the existing structures of publishing. As an editor and a lover of books, I sympathize. But why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so? And why should a transition away from the printed page lessen our appreciation and love for printed books? Hardbacks these days are disposable vessels, printed on ever crappier paper with bindings that skew and crack. In a world where we do most of our serious reading on screens, books may again thrive as expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects may allow them to flourish as design objects.
As to the fate of book publishers, there's less reason to be optimistic. Amazon, which is selling most new books at a loss to get everyone hooked on the Kindle, will eventually want to make money on them. The publishers will be squeezed at best and disintermediated at worst. Amazon is already publishing Stephen King. In the future, it could become the only publisher a best-selling author needs. In a world without the high fixed costs of printing and distribution, as the distance between writers and their audiences shrinks, what essential service will Random House and Simon & Schuster provide? If the answer is primarily cultural arbitration and editing, the publishing behemoths might dwindle while a much lighter weight model of publishing—clever kids working from coffee shops in Brooklyn—emerges.
What we should worry about is that the system supports the creation of literature, if grudgingly. There's a risk that what replaces it won't allow as many writers to make as good a living. But there's also a chance it could allow more writers to make a better living. For newspaper journalism, the future looks bleak at the moment. As the economic model for daily reporting collapses, we're losing the support structure for large-scale newsgathering. At the same time, the Internet has radically expanded the potential audience of every journalist while bringing a new freedom to experiment and innovate. When it comes to literature, I'm optimistic that electronic reading will bring more good than harm. New modes of communication will spur new forms while breathing life into old ones. Reading without paper might make literature more urgent and accessible than it was before the technological revolution, just like Gutenberg did.
A version of this article appears in this week's issue of Newsweek.
Emily Yoffe, aka Dear Prudence, is on Washingtonpost.com every Monday at 1 p.m. to chat with readers about their romantic, family, financial, and workplace problems. She's taking next week off but will be back live on April 6. (Read her Slate columns here.) An unedited transcript of this week's chat follows.
Emily Yoffe: Good afternoon. Let's get started!
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Washington, D.C.: I'm in my early 30s, and at the age where people always ask if you have kids, want kids, or plan to have kids. This is not something I want to launch into with people I don't know well (and even people I do), so how can I deflect comments/questions such as these without seeming rude?
Emily Yoffe: People often recommend, "Why do you ask?" as a good conversation stopper. But that really doesn't end the conversation, it just leaves the other person sputtering for a response. I like, "You'll be the first to know."
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Alexandria, Va.: My aunt panics if she can't get in touch with me. If I don't answer my phones (home and cell), she immediately assumes that I'm in some kind of trouble and calls my mother to find out if she knows where I am and if I'm OK. For example: one time, I TOLD her I was going to a happy hour with some coworkers, and probably wouldn't be able to hear my phone. In the 90 minutes I was there, she called six times, left two messages, and called my mother (who also left two messages). I could give you many more examples. Oh, and I'm in my late 20s and married.
I get that she does this because she cares, but it's driving me mad. Is there any polite way to tell her that sometimes people can't answer their phones and that "inaccessible for a few hours" does not mean "dead in a ditch somewhere"?
Emily Yoffe: It's one thing to have a mother who's batty about your safety. Comedian Amy Borkowsky has built a career on the hilarious lengths her mother will go to make sure she's all right. But why do you even take your aunt's calls? The woman clearly needs treatment for whatever ails her, but you need her to stop ailing you. Tell her that you two are going cold turkey and you're not going to answer her calls anymore. Surely she'll find someone else to worry about.
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Washington, D.C.: I thought my mother raised a gentleman. I hold doors, let others off elevators first, and always remember my p's and q's. And because I think 21st century gentlemen are more enlightened than 19th and early 20th century gentlemen, I perform social niceties without gender in mind. Unfortunately, I recently went out on a date with a woman that became irritated because I apparently did not walk on the proper side of her on the sidewalk (Admittedly, walking too fast is a bad habit of mine, but this concerned positioning). She said it was basic etiquette for a man to walk on the outside of his date, on the side closest to the street. I have never heard of this convention. I assume the convention relates to the days of unpaved streets when passing horses and wagons might splash water and muck (and worse!) on pedestrians. I did a bit of research and could only find one etiquette book that mentions this sidewalk rule. Am I just another clueless pseudo-gentleman or is she hopelessly old fashioned?
-Thinks he may have mucked it up
Emily Yoffe: It's good you didn't point out to her that it's equally impolite to get irritated and unpleasant on a date over an issue that only a tiny number of people would even be aware is a faux pas. Yes, your research is correct about the origin of that convention, but your date is being a stickler over something that no one pays any attention to anymore. I hope she had some other redeeming qualities.
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Rotterdam, Netherlands: I have a very good friend that I met in college 10 years ago. He has always been obese. At one point, he seemed to be losing weight successfully, but now that he works an office job, his weight has ballooned by at least a hundred pounds. I have also known his wife for 10 years. When I first met her, she was a size 6. She has gained at least 10 dress sizes in that time. They are both in complete denial about this, saying they would rather be fat and happy than skinny and miserable, but at the rate they're going, he especially is not going to be around much longer. He is already suffering from hypertension and sleep apnea and he's barely 30! I only see them a few times a year, when I visit my hometown, but when I do, they always want to go to a restaurant, where they order things like 16-ounce steaks with fries and 4-cheese dip with fried pita bread. From what they tell me, this is how they eat every day. They don't even have bread or milk at home! I can't really invite them for a home-cooked meal since I'm only visiting when I'm there. Do you have any suggestions on how to behave around these two people who seem determined to eat themselves to death?
Emily Yoffe: Since they've told you they want to be fat and happy, you obviously have already had a conversation with them about your alarm over their weight. If the numbers on the scale doesn't concern them, your semi-annual lectures are going to have no effect. If you enjoy their company, just have a good time when you're out with them. And no one wants to share a meal with someone who is pointing out that the steak is going to kill them.
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Washington, D.C.: Hi Prudence,
I'm not sure how to deal with an awkward situation. A good college friend got engaged this fall. She sent me an email asking to confirm my address for the invitation, to which I promptly replied. Now I see (via Facebook), and hear from friends that she sent out "Save the Dates" more than a month ago. I never received one.
Now, I respect her right to invite whoever the heck she wants, and we're admittedly not as close as we once were (different coasts, electronic communication). But based on some others who she invited who were in our group of friends but not as close, I think there may have been a mistake.
How do I handle this? I don't want to put her on the spot, but don't want to miss out on celebrating her big day if she wanted me there... Help!
Emily Yoffe: Didn't I just read that someone has just written a book on Facebook etiquette? We need one. This is a case in which you could deputize someone to ask for you. Have a friend you know has been invited say to the bride, "I was talking to 'Kate' the other day and she said she got an email from you asking for her address, but she never got an invitation. She didn't seem upset, but she's wondering if she's still invited." That at least should solve this mystery.
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Professional Services for Free: Dear Prudie,
I'm a professional editor. My family, friends, and colleagues frequently ask me to edit their documents—resumes, papers, important emails, etc.—in my spare time. Ordinarily, I don't mind helping out, especially if the document is short.
However, I have one friend who has, over the past year, asked me to edit more than 250 pages of his dissertation. I've helped much more than I feel inclined to, giving up more than 50 hours ($2,500 if I freelanced it) of my time. I'm bored of the topic of the dissertation and not interested in spending my free time editing his work any longer.
I need help formulating a clear and polite response next time he asks for assistance. I've occasionally said that I'm too busy to help, but I need to be more clear that I don't welcome future requests related to the dissertation. This man is a friend whom I otherwise really like and don't want to offend; at the same time, he is clearly willing to exploit this connection and I need to set boundaries.
Thanks so much.
Emily Yoffe: All professionals should be able to enjoy their relationships with people without being exploited. That means doctors shouldn't be expected to give free appendectomies, and computer experts shouldn't be expected to come and get the porn spam out of your computer, etc. To friends and family just say that you edit for a living and don't want to do it for free in your free time—unless you are in the mood to help with something short. As for your "friend", you can tell him that while he may not be done with his dissertation, you are.
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Kookooville: So my mom calls me a lot. Like, 3-4 times a day on the weekends. She picks the most inconvenient times to call—when I'm feeding the kids or giving them baths or taking a nap. So we've started not answering calls when it's not convenient for us. (Her calls aren't the only ones we don't answer—anyone who calls at those times don't get picked up.) So after she called 9 (!) times yesterday, and asked why we didn't pick up—were we out shopping, were we outside enjoying the weather—I told her that we don't pick up unless we're in a position to talk. So now she says "well, I guess I won't call you anymore" AND she called my dad & step-mom, brother, two sisters, aunt, and cousin to say "oh, she doesn't want me to call her anymore." Seriously, how do I deal with this? I'm fine talking to her once or twice over the weekend, but 6 one-minute-long conversations ("What are you up to today?" "Laundry") don't really get me excited.
Emily Yoffe: She said, "Well, I won't call you anymore"—what a victory! That was easy, wasn't it? (Not that I believe her.) Now, when you have the time to call her and talk, do so, and when you've run out of time say, "Mom, great talking to you, I've got to go." If she throws a snit or won't talk to you, then you can do something else with your time.
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Denver, Col.: Hello! My husband has a really annoying habit that is about to send me over the edge. Let's call it an 'adjustment' problem. He 'adjusts' himself at least 20 times an hour (it feels like) and it drives me insane and grosses me out. I've mentioned it, fussed about it, tried to ignore it, etc. Any suggestions on how to handle it? Thanks!
Emily Yoffe: He couldn't have been doing this while you were dating or else surely you wouldn't be married. Does he do this at work? (If so, how is he still employed?) This has become a compulsion and there is something more wrong in his head than his pants. Perhaps he would agree to see a doctor with you to discuss what is going on and how to stop it—surely he's motivated enough to get you to stop mentioning it to him. Explain your concerned because this habit could have severely unpleasant consequences.
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Washington, D.C.: I am a woman in my mid-twenties, and was raised to take care of myself and not rely on a man to do it. As such, when on a date, I don't expect doors to be held for me, or chairs pulled out, or car doors opened (I actually find those last two kind of obnoxious). I also find it really insulting if a man refuses to walk through a door that I am holding open for him. The problem is, my stepfather does expect that my boyfriends do these things, and consequently, he dislikes most of my boyfriends. How do I convince him that I am not helpless, I don't want my chair pulled out for me, and I would really just prefer that whoever gets to the door first hold it open?
Emily Yoffe: If you are happy with the guys you date and neither one of you are interested in car door or chair etiquette, just ignore your stepfather's criticism.
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Baltimore, Md.: I am a 50+ year old woman, and many of my friends are of similar age. Many of us regularly have to pluck long wiry hairs growing from our chins. There is one woman in our circle of friends who just lets them grow. Is there any polite way to suggest she should do something about this?
Emily Yoffe: Equality in facial hair is one of the unsung benefits of aging. Maybe this is why nature designed our eyes to start going at the same time—so we won't stand in front of the bathroom mirror and scream at the realization we've become bearded ladies. Say to your friend, "I need to have an awkward discussion with you. Marge, you may not be aware of it, but you've got some facial hairs you need to take care of because they are really marring your good looks."
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Incessant calls from parents: I used to think that my mom was calling me all the time, and that she always called at a bad time.
Now, I try to make sure that I call her at least once a week, and if I can't get to the phone when she calls, I don't fret.
It makes her not feel like she's the only one calling, and it made me realise that she just wants to talk. To me. Gee, how bad can that be?
I know, it was just a change in my behavior. But the truth is, it isn't that hard to just pick up the phone and call her once a week or so. And now, I don't feel guilty if I don't pick up the phone sometimes.
Emily Yoffe: Excellent advice, both on what to do and on attitude.
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Santa Cruz, Calif.: Hi. Re which side of a date do you walk on, I'm pretty sure the current etiquette is for the man always to walk on the woman's left. This is because in these times the "danger" is much more likely to come from an approaching human (e.g., a purse snatcher) than from a rearing horse. Since most foot traffic walks on the right side of the sidewalk in each direction (like car traffic) this approach puts the man between the woman and strangers.
Emily Yoffe: This is an argument for dropping the whole idea that sex chromosomes should dictate position on the sidewalk.
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Washington, D.C.: Dear Prudence, I have a friend who bails out of plans at the last minute. In her mind, all plans are tentative until she shows up (which makes dinner reservations and being seated at restaurants slightly problematic). Is there a polite way to say "stop canceling at the last minute, or I am going to stop inviting you?"
Emily Yoffe: It's nice of you to restrain the impulse to call her a self-centered, inconsiderate flake. You can say something like,"I love spending time with you, and I know we're all busy, but it's frustrating to make plans with you and then have you not show up. If I can't rely on you to follow through, I'm not going to keep asking you." And surely you have found you don't actually love spending time with her because that usually means sitting at a restaurant by yourself staring at your watch.
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College Point, N.Y.: How do I get my girlfriend to get back with me? It was all my fault because I was seeing someone else and she left me when she found out, but now I want her back. She is the one for me. What can I do to get her back
Emily Yoffe: You can tell her you realize how much you hurt her over your foolishness and that you would like another chance. If she doesn't want to give you one, leave her alone. And absorb this painful lesson about cheating.
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Washington, D.C.: I have visited the infertility clinic 3x/month for the last four months. During each appointment, I have to interact with 3-4 people who each always ask me how I am. Truthfully, I am not handling the crushing disappointment of not being able to get pregnant very well. I realize their questions are their way of being polite and my normal answer, outside of the doctor's office, is a simple 'fine'. However, inside the doctor's office, I just refuse to say that I am fine. I am nowhere near fine. And frankly, considering why people come to their office, they should suspect that a large majority of their patients are not going to have a very nice answer to this question.
Is there an answer I can give that is generic enough that I'm not pouring my heart out to a stranger's throwaway question, yet isn't positive?
Emily Yoffe: This is truly a case where they are just being polite. You would probably be equally annoyed if you regularly went to a clinic and the people you interacted with never even bothered to ask how you are. "As well as can be expected, thanks," should do it.
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Herndon, Va.: Do you have a polite, yet snarky answer to the question, "Can I borrow some money?"
My coworkers constantly ask me for large sums of money ($600+). How do I get them to stop asking?
Emily Yoffe: What kind of office is this—a loan shark? No need to be snarky. A simple, "Sorry, I can't help you," should do.
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Washington, D.C.: I'm getting married in October and I think my mom wants nothing to do with it. I'm been with my fiance for over seven years so the idea of us getting married was not a complete shock to her. She has never said she doesn't want to be involved, but every time I mention something about it she changes the subject. I'm even planning a spa day for the girls the morning of the wedding and she said she just wants to "show up" to the wedding and not be a part of the activities we have planned for guests. It's a small group and a destination wedding. My question is... how do I handle her? I never thought in a million years my mother would be the one to bring the stress at my wedding. Do I keep her out or try and get her involved? We are paying for the entire wedding too and haven't asked my parents for anything.
Emily Yoffe: Since you are not financially entangled with your mother over your wedding (Good for you!) this really is an issue about your relationship with her. Just be honest and say you've been hurt that she seems so disinterested in your wedding. Ask her what's wrong. Maybe she resents that she hasn't been asked to be part of the planning. Maybe she can't afford the trip to the destination. Maybe she's never liked your fiance. Be direct but non-confrontational and tell her it will mean a lot to have her there and happy for you.
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Anonymous: Emily, I wrote last week about my estranged father wanting to be at the birth of my next child. I ended up responding to him, telling him my feelings about the situation, etc, and he responded to me with a very scathing email. Because of it, and the patterns he's displayed in the past, I've decided to cut off all communication. Someone asked me what positives he brought to my life and I couldn't think of any. I guess I just need reassurance that cutting out a poisonous person, even if they appear at times to be not so poisonous, is an ok thing to do.
Emily Yoffe: It is a very difficult decision to end contact with a close family member. But sometimes that is simply the only way not to be drawn back into endless dramatics with someone who only causes pain. That was a very good question you were asked; and if someone brings nothing positive to your life, then you need that person out of your life. You don't have decide now that you will never, ever have contact again. Just see what it feels like to stop it for now.
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Fairfax, Va.: Hi Prudence,
I am a very fair-skinned, dark-haired woman in my 30's who suffers an ongoing bout with Rosacea. I know it is unsightly to be as red as a shrieking fishwife, and I do take medications on my skin and orally. How do I respond to "your face is red" or "sunburn?" without going into gory detail about it not being contagious, etc.?
Thank you
Emily Yoffe: It depends on whether you want to get into this with people. More important than the information you convey is the way you convey it. If you're comfortable explaining you have rosacea you can just say in a relaxed way, "No, not a sunburn. I have rosacea, it's an inherited condition and fortunately, I'm getting treatment for it."
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Nashville, Tenn.: I wish I had a mother to call and who could call me. How I miss that!!!
Emily Yoffe: Good point. Yet that doesn't mean that we should accept behavior from people we love we are happy to have here with us that is driving us batty.
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Alexandria: How about a comment for those people who keep wanting to know why I don't have a boyfriend? It's been 3 years and while I've dated and I am often busy every weekend with volunteering, clubs, activities and the like, no one has been serious. I'm beyond exhausted from the "when you least expect it he will come" (I stopped expecting each date to be THE ONE a long time ago), "well why don't you have a boyfriend" (if I knew the answer, I might not be single), "maybe if you dyed hair blond/got a tattoo/went to bars for one night stands" (do these people know me?)....
Emily Yoffe: If your friends are suggesting you dye your hair, get a tattoo, and have one night stands as a way of meeting guys, then you may not need a boyfriend, but you do need new friends!
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Emily Yoffe: Thanks everyone. I'll be back in two weeks.
I've been taking the Lantern's advice and eating at home more often than going out. Now I'm wondering how I should be preparing that home cooking. What's the greener choice for heating up my meals—the microwave or the oven?
Your foodie friends may cringe at the thought, but cash-strapped grad students and single urbanites have had it right all along: As a general rule, microwaves are more eco-friendly than conventional ovens. However, that doesn't mean you should consign yourself to a life of gummy casseroles and dry chicken just to save the planet.
First off, a little perspective. According to the Department of Energy, cooking accounts for a little less than 3 percent of an average home's energy use (PDF). So any changes you make aren't going to add up to much—you'll have a much bigger impact by looking to your light fixtures or your thermostat. On the other hand, it is fairly easy to cut energy consumption in the kitchen, so why wouldn't you?
As a general rule, any oven powered by electricity—whether or not it's a microwave—is going to cook food more efficiently than a gas-powered appliance. About 12 percent to 14 percent of the energy drawn by a standard electric oven goes toward cooking your food. With a gas-powered oven, that number drops to a little less than 6 percent. (Microwaves handily beat both, directing about 60 percent of their energy toward cooking.) Still, when compared with conventional electric ovens, gas-powered ovens are usually considered more efficient overall, since there are significant energy losses associated with generating electricity and then transmitting it to your home. So if you have a gas oven, use it with the Lantern's blessing.*
That's not an option for the majority of American households, though. About 60 percent of our conventional ovens are powered by electricity, not gas—and they're less efficient than standard microwaves. In the first place, conventional ovens operate at a higher wattage—about 3,000, compared with something between 600 and 1,650 for a microwave. They also cost us energy by cooking food more slowly. One University of Bristol study found that a chicken cooked in a convection microwave resulted in energy savings of 30 percent over a conventional electric oven.
You'll see the greatest energy savings when cooking up small portions. One Swedish study, for example, found that cooking a single portion of baked potatoes in an oven took 9.5 times as much energy as it did in a microwave. When that was increased to four portions, however, the oven used only 2.5 times as much energy per serving (PDF). When the meals get big enough—a pot roast plus vegetables, for example—you're better off skipping the microwave altogether.
Microwaves do have a few other environmental advantages. For one thing, they produce a lot less indoor air pollution than other cooking methods. Plus, they don't heat up your house the way an oven can, which means lower energy costs associated with both your A/C and your refrigerator. Heating up a meal on the plate you intend to eat off of also means fewer dishes to wash—although regular use of your microwave might encourage higher consumption of ready-to-eat convenience meals and all their extra packaging.
Whichever cooking method you choose, there are plenty of little things you can do to save energy. With a conventional oven, avoid preheating and turn the heat off a few minutes before your food is done. If you switch from metal pans to heat-retaining glass or ceramic ones, you'll be able to turn your oven down by 25 degrees. Microwave ovens can be made more efficient by keeping them clean—the appliance can't tell the difference between your dinner and old cheese splatters, so it'll expend energy heating up both. Also remember to keep the appliance unplugged when you're not using it. (Over its lifetime, the average microwave will use as much energy in standby mode as it will in actually cooking your food.)
In the end, though, the greenest way to cook your food is the one that produces the tastiest meal. As we've discussed here before, food waste is an important environmental consideration: Not only does it mean more garbage, it also means squandering all the resources that went into growing, storing, and preparing that food. Let's say you roasted your Sunday-night chicken dinners in the microwave rather than the oven for a whole year. Over 52 weeks you'd save 15.6 kilowatt-hours—or about 0.14 percent of your home's annual energy use. If saving that teeny bit of energy means you'd be more likely to toss your soggy leftovers, then by all means, fire up the big boy and cook that chicken right.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.
Correction, March 27, 2009: The original version provided the wrong context for understanding why gas ovens might be greener than electric ovens. It failed to mention that the delivery of electricity to the home is relatively inefficient. (Return to the corrected paragraph.)
Afghanistan is the main topic of the day as all the papers preview the announcement President Obama will make today about changes to the American strategy to decrease violence in the war-torn country that will place lots of emphasis on Pakistan. Obama will announce plans to send 4,000 military trainers to Afghanistan in the fall, which will be on top of the additional 17,000 combat troops the president authorized last month and "hundreds" of U.S. civilian officials. USA Today points out that sending additional aid workers "follows Obama's previous statements that Afghanistan can't be tamed by military force alone." For the first time, the U.S. government will explicitly tie future aid to certain benchmarks that will measure how much the Afghan and Pakistani governments are doing to fight al-Qaida and the Taliban. In demanding concrete results from the two countries, Obama "is replicating a strategy used in Iraq two years ago," notes the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times highlights that the new strategy comes at a time when Afghanistan's former Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, "is pursuing a determined effort to reclaim power." The Wall Street Journal notes that the Pentagon is considering setting up "a new U.S. military command in southern Afghanistan," which would "signal increasing American control over the war effort." The Washington Post highlights that the new strategy will involve a significant increase in the financial commitment to both Afghanistan and Pakistan and increase U.S. military expenses in Afghanistan by around 60 percent this year.
The NYT places Obama's plan as one piece in its two-story lead. The paper's main story reveals that Taliban leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan have decided to set aside their differences and work together in a new offensive in Afghanistan to greet the buildup of American troops. In an impressive feat of reporting, the NYT talked to several Taliban fighters along the border region who say a group of younger commanders has recently been promoted to carry out a stepped-up campaign of attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The NYT says Mullah Omar sent emissaries to his counterparts in Pakistan to convince them to focus on Afghanistan so the Taliban can greet American troops with a renewed display of force. The Pakistani Taliban have been divided into three branches that haven't always seen eye-to-eye, but Mullah Omar apparently urged them to set aside their differences so they can all work together against the Americans. This renewed cooperation has raised fears among NATO commanders that the violence in Afghanistan will soon get much worse. Taliban fighters say they have reason to worry and predict that it would be a "very bloody" year.
Obama's new plan for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region comes after a two-month review that began pretty much as soon as he moved into the White House. The president "will describe it as a sharp break with what officials called a directionless and under-resourced conflict inherited from the Bush administration," notes the Post. Essentially, the White House hopes to bring an end to the growing insurgency, by focusing on "building local governments, wooing the civilian population with aid and providing more help to the Afghan army," USAT summarizes. The administration is convinced that a significant proportion of insurgents can be induced to support their local governments. The WSJ points out that the Obama administration is explicitly moving away from the Bush administration's broad goal of building a healthy democracy in Afghanistan to focus more specifically on defeating al-Qaida and the Taliban. The efforts will also place a specific focus on fighting the narcotics trade in Afghanistan.
The NYT notes that the goals Obama will outline "may be elusive and, according to some critics, even naive." The administration wants to get several countries, including China, Russia, and India, involved by specifying that the Afghan war is a regional issue in which everyone has a stake. Still, Obama seems to have accepted the fact that other NATO members aren't likely to contribute more combat troops to the effort and instead will ask European countries to send more trainers and economic aid to the region.
Officials say the benchmarks for Afghanistan and Pakistan are still being developed, but they emphasized that the demands will be strict. Placing conditions on aid for Pakistan might prove particularly difficult since similar, less ambitious efforts have been resisted in the past. But the administration is determined to move away from the old way of doing things. "We're going to move from a policy of throwing money at Pakistan and then ignoring it to a policy of consistency and constancy," a senior administration official said.
In other news, the WP reveals that Freddie Mac and its regulator recently got into a big tiff over what information the mortgage giant should reveal to private investors. The federal government seized Freddie Mac in September, but this latest drama shows how it's still not clear what role the government should play in the company's day-to-day operations. A few weeks ago, executives decided they should disclose to private investors that the government's management was costing it billions of dollars and would hurt its bottom line. The regulator didn't like the sound of that and urged Freddie executives to press the delete button. The regulator backed down only after executives threatened to take the issue up with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is just the latest example of how the company's employees "are struggling to determine whether their highest priority should be to fulfill the mandates of the Obama administration or find a way back to profitability," notes the Post.
The WSJ points out that even as the Treasury Department promised to usher in "a new era of accountability, transparency, and conditions," it isn't answering a seemingly simple question: How much money is left from the $700 billion bailout package? Assuming the Treasury spends $100 billion of the TARP funds to help buy toxic assets, private calculations put the amount of money remaining at $52.6 billion. But the Treasury isn't saying. Even when asked directly, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has evaded giving a specific answer.
The WSJ fronts a look at how stocks continued to rally yesterday and the Dow Jones industrial average finished up 174.75 points. The Dow has now increased 21 percent from its recent bottom, "a new bull market by a common Wall Street definition." It marks the first time the market has gained 20 percent since October 2007, and it was all achieved in 13 trading days, "making it the fastest 20% rebound from a bear-market low since 1938," notes the paper. Many think this is just temporary, because short-term investors are responsible for much of the increase but they will jump out of the market at the first sign of trouble. Experts say that it seems like many investors are trying to "time the market," which makes the market more volatile. "Anecdotally, many hedge funds have become more like day traders," an analyst said. Even if it's just a temporary rally, many think it could last several weeks, and some are even declaring that the bear market might be ending. Of course, many have thought that before only to be bitterly disappointed.
The papers go inside with a Sudanese government official claiming that convoy trucks carrying weapons and African migrants were bombed by foreign warplanes. The convoys were believed to be carrying weapons destined for Gaza, and the NYT talks to American officials who confirm that the airstrikes were carried out by Israeli warplanes. Israel refused to confirm the attack, but if it was involved, it "would underscore the Jewish state's determination to strike far beyond its borders to protect its security," notes the LAT. It's unclear how many people died in the attacks. The LAT quotes a spokesman for Sudan's Transport Ministry who said as many as 800 people died, but the NYT talks to another government spokesman who put the number at "more than 100."
The NYT points out that while many stars have recently turned to Twitter to give fans a close-up look into their daily lives, it turns out that—shockingly!—the rich and famous may not be the ones doing all that typing. In "many cases" stars have turned to what the paper dubs "ghost Twitterers" to maintain a constant stream of updates. Most aren't willing to admit it, but celebrities are hardly alone in this practice as many politicians also assign staff members to keep up with their social networks. Basketball star Shaquille O'Neal insists he writes all his own stuff. "It's 140 characters," he said. "If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you."
The New York Times leads with word that operatives from a secretive wing of Pakistan's military intelligence agency are providing direct support—including money, supplies, and strategic planning—to the Taliban as well as other militant groups in Afghanistan. The Washington Post leads with, and the NYT fronts, a preview of the Obama administration's plan to expand federal regulation over the financial system, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will begin to outline for lawmakers today. The plan would expand federal regulations to all financial derivative products and companies that have previously been free of such oversight, including insurance companies, hedge funds, and private-equity firms. The administration sees these new regulations as essential to restore faith in the financial system.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with President Obama lobbying Democratic lawmakers to maintain his priorities in the budget and stay united throughout the negotiations. But divisions are already emerging, and some centrist Democrats are pushing for a budget with less spending and fewer tax cuts in order to lower the deficit. The Los Angeles Times leads with Congress approving "the largest expansion of the wilderness system in 15 years," extending federal protection to 2 million acres in nine states. In what will be President Obama's first signing of an important conservation bill, almost as much land will be designated as wilderness as was done so throughout his predecessor's entire tenure. The measure would also initiate one of the largest river restoration projects and step up protection of scenic rivers. USA Today leads with federal accident investigators suggesting that the pilot was to blame for the crash that killed 50 people outside Buffalo last month. Weather was initially suspected to have been the culprit, but investigators said the crash was likely due to the pilot's decision to take the plane into a sudden steep climb that led to a loss of control over the aircraft.
The fact that Pakistan's spies help out the Taliban is hardly news, but the details revealed by the NYT today show "that the spy agency is aiding a broader array of militant networks with more diverse types of support than was previously known." No one thinks that Pakistan's top leaders have a hand in what's going on in the S Wing of Pakistan's spy service, but they also seem unwilling or unable to stop it. Pakistani officials say that Americans make too much of these ties, insisting they're just part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan after the U.S. troops have left.
The WSJ also hears word of this connection and adds that U.S. and Pakistani officials are drawing up a new list of targets for Predator drone strikes along the Afghan border, which is part of an American review of the program. Pakistani officials want to expand the program so it also targets extremists who have attacked Pakistanis, in the hope that it would help the government win some support domestically. Although the program is largely considered successful, so it's unlikely to change significantly, the WSJ notes that the review wants to set out clear guidelines on under what circumstances the strikes should be carried out, and it "could change the pace and size of the program."
The NYT points out that Obama's plan to overhaul the federal regulations of the financial system "goes further than expected." And the WSJ highlights that Geithner's presentation to lawmakers today merely "represents an early salvo in what will likely be a long debate." The WP notes that it makes sense that these changes are coming now since the "nation's financial regulations are largely an accumulation of responses to financial crises," but it's still important to note that the administration's proposals amount to the "most significant regulatory expansion" since the Great Depression era. "In essence, the plan is a rebuke of raw capitalism and a reassertion that regulation is critical to the healthy function of financial markets," says the Post.
Most of what the Obama administration wants to put in place would require approval from Congress. What the WP describes as the White House's "signature proposal" involves giving one federal agency (probably the Federal Reserve) oversight responsibility across the financial system with the power to regulate the largest financial firms, including nonbank entities. Congress would have to pass legislation in order to determine which firms are considered so large that their failure would be a shock to the entire financial system, and then these companies would be required to meet much more stringent capital requirements to prevent them from running out of cash when the economy tumbles.
Unregulated investment firms, such as hedge funds and private-equity funds, would have to register for the first time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The administration also wants the SEC to have more power over money-market mutual funds to ensure they don't take on too much risk. The NYT predicts that the biggest fight will be over the administration's plan to regulate trading "in more exotic derivatives that trade privately," such as credit-default swaps. Geithner isn't expected to give much detail in how all this would work, but it's just the beginning.
The WP notes that over the next few months, the administration will present proposals to protect consumers, revise existing regulations to remove any flaws, and increase coordination with the international community. It is hardly a coincidence that the administration is launching the first stage in its plan mere days before Geithner and Obama are scheduled to meet with world leaders in London to discuss the crisis, as many European countries have said that reforming the financial regulatory structure is one of their top priorities.
When Obama went to lobby Senate Democrats on the budget yesterday, he kept the focus on the issues where there's much agreement between party members. "It was vintage Obama," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. "He made us all feel content and inspired by where we need to go." Still, there are real divisions between the Democrats, but it seems Obama's most ambitious initiatives that he has identified as his priorities—education, health, energy, and deficit reduction—will remain in the budget. The NYT notes that these divisions among Democrats "bring to life a paradox of political success." As a party expands its base, it means that it's harder to keep all of its members united.
The WSJ fronts word that Obama's auto industry task force will begin announcing decisions within the next few days, and it seems like the government is ready to lend General Motors and Chrysler some more money. The government doesn't want to see the companies go bankrupt, and, in fact, the task force is likely to say that both companies can have "viable futures ... but only if there are sacrifices from their managements, unions and GM's bondholders," reports the WSJ. The automakers have requested $22 billion more, but the "task force may not disburse new aid immediately, choosing instead to preserve that as leverage," notes the paper.
The WP is alone in fronting news that John Hope Franklin, one of the nation's most prominent scholars of African-American history, died of congestive heart failure yesterday. He was 94. The Post highlights that Franklin's reputation wasn't just due to his scholarly work but also because he "had seen racial horrors up close and thus was able to give his academic work a stinging ballast." Franklin was among the first black scholars to earn top spots in some of the nation's leading universities. His book From Slavery to Freedom has sold more than 3 million copies and is still in many college reading lists.
In the WP's op-ed page, Walter Dellinger writes a tribute to Franklin and calls him "one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century." Dellinger taught a class with Franklin for seven years and "never ceased to marvel at how he managed both to embody this history and yet recount it with an extraordinarily candid honesty." Franklin "was the master of the great American story of that century, the story of race." After Obama won the Democratic nomination, Franklin acknowledged he never thought he would live long enough to see a black man win a major party's nomination. "That he did live into this year seems a special gift from God."
The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with, and everyone else fronts, President Obama's second prime-time news conference, where he defended his proposed $3.6 trillion budget plan, which is beginning to make its way through Congress. "The budget I submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a stronger foundation so that we don't face another crisis like this 10 or 20 years from now," he said. Obama focused much of his attention on the economy, adding that there are already signs of improvement but emphasizing numerous times that the American people need to be patient. "We will recover from this recession, but it will take time," Obama said.
The Los Angeles Times leads with the Obama administration announcing a plan to send hundreds of federal agents and intelligence analysts to the country's southern border to help combat Mexican drug-related violence and prevent it from seeping into the United States. It marks "the most determined U.S. effort in years to counter the powerful and dangerous cartels" that are enmeshed in a deadly battle with the Mexican government that has already killed more than 7,000 people over the last 15 months. The New York Times leads with the White House's proposal to allow the government to take control of any financial institution that is in trouble and is considered big enough to create trouble in the broader financial system. The government already has that power with banks and other deposit-taking institutions, but the proposal would extend that authority to other financial institutions, such as insurance companies and hedge funds. House Democrats say they hope to act on legislation soon. If the measure is approved, "it would represent one of the biggest permanent expansions of federal regulatory power in decades," notes the NYT.
The NYT states that Americans who tuned in last night to Obama's news conference didn't see a "fiery and inspirational speaker" or a "conversational president" but rather "Barack Obama the lecturer." Barely moving from a flat tone of voice, "he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs … sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell." The LAT points out that the night was devoid of any "particularly memorable moments" as it seemed the president was determined to "present himself as a steady hand at the helm."
There was only one point when Obama seemed to lose his calm demeanor, which came after a reporter asked why it had taken him so long to express anger over the AIG bonuses. "Well, it took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak," he tartly replied.
On the subject of the bonuses, his voice may not have sounded angry, but he assured Americans that he was, although he also emphasized that the country "can't afford to demonize every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit." He also defended efforts to seek authority to take over nonbank financial institutions, stating that it is "precisely because of the lack of this authority that the AIG situation has gotten worse."
In his one overtly partisan tone of the evening, Obama said Republican critics of his budget have "a short memory, because as I recall, I'm inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit, from them." Obama will meet with Democratic senators today to discuss the budget, and insisted yesterday he is open to compromise on some issues but highlighted that he wants Congress to move on his four top priorities. "The bottom line is that I want to see health care, energy, education and serious efforts to reduce our budget deficit," he said.
The WSJ points out that Obama "hit on a new theme for his administration: Persistence," which he emphasized will be his way of handling the numerous problems facing the country. "That whole philosophy of persistence … is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come," he said. "I'm a big believer in persistence."
In a front-page piece, the LAT's Mary McNamara writes that Obama is "a child of television" and "it is television he trusts." He snubbed the Washington press corps and didn't attend the annual Gridiron Club dinner, but he made an appearance on ESPN, late-night television, 60 Minutes, and then his second prime-time news conference. Obama's "on-screen persona at its best plays to the American desire for a real-guy president a la Michael Douglas in An American President." Obama seems determined to build a personal relationship with the American public, and "[s]hort of his own Facebook page, television is as close as it gets." When watching the president from the comfort of your own home, Obama is "just a regular guy—someone you might know, the parent of one of your daughter's friends," writes McNamara. "Except that, oh yeah, he's also the president."
In addition to the resources that will be deployed to the Mexican border, the administration also highlighted that it will step up efforts to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States as well as weapons smuggling from the United States. In total, the administration said it will spend $700 million this year in a variety of efforts, and probably more in the future. Still, many in Mexico, as well as several government officials from border states, say this isn't enough to counter the growing drug-related violence. Indeed, many of the moves that were announced yesterday involved expansions of programs that were started by former President Bush. The WP highlights that the plan was "notable for what it omitted" because it didn't ask for any new troops or funding from Congress. But one Mexican official says he got assurances from the White House that "more is coming up in the near future."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Mexico today, in the first of several top-level visits from U.S. officials, which will include Obama next month. "They will find a country mired in a deepening slump, miffed by signs of protectionism in its largest trading partner, and torn apart by a drug war for which many in Mexico blame customers in the United States," notes the NYT in a front-page piece. The troubles in Mexico mean that the Obama administration will have to make changes to its policies toward the country's southern neighbor "earlier than it might have wished."
The WSJ is alone in fronting news that Israel's Labor Party voted to join the coalition government of Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu. The move immediately added diversity to Netanyahu's right-wing coalition to include at least one part that is a strong advocate for peace with Palestinians. And, in fact, the written agreement between the two sides included a pledge to pursue peace. The vote to join the coalition created a huge rift in the Labor Party, but it technically gave Netanyahu a bloc of at least 66 votes in the 120-member parliament. Ehud Barak, the party's leader, would remain as defense minister.
The NYT's op-ed page publishes a resignation letter that Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president at AIG's financial products unit, sent to the company's CEO on Tuesday. DeSantis says he wasn't in any way involved in the credit-default swaps that led to AIG's downfall, and highlights that "[m]ost of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage." DeSantis agreed to work for an annual salary of $1 and was repeatedly reassured that his 12 months of "hard work dismantling the company" would be rewarded. Many employees "are now angry about having been misled by AIG's promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you." DeSantis says he will donate all of the $742,006.40, after taxes, to "organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn" and promises to send receipts as proof. "I'm not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at least [Connecticut] Attorney General [Richard] Blumenthal should be relieved that I'll leave under my own power and will not need to be 'shoved out the door.' "
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner formally unveiled the White House plan to clean out toxic assets from banks' balance sheets on Monday, and investors gave it the equivalent of a standing ovation. Contrary to what happened in early February when Geithner first outlined the plan in such general terms that everyone was disappointed, stocks surged around the world yesterday. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 6.8 percent, its biggest gain since October, suggesting that "investors bet that the government may have finally found a way to fix the nagging problem at the core of the financial crisis," notes the Los Angeles Times. The Wall Street Journal says "the reaction seemed more a sigh of relief at seeing some details of the program, after weeks of waiting, than an overwhelming endorsement," particularly since "much fine print is still to be spelled out." The New York Times takes the broadest look at the three-part plan that could end up purchasing "up to $2 trillion in real estate assets" and points out that it was "bigger and more generous to private investors than expected." The Washington Post hears word that administration officials "made changes to the plan in recent days in a way that makes it more favorable to private investors."
USA Today goes big with Geithner's announcement but devotes its lead spot to a look at how certain industries and states have been able to continue hiring employees throughout the recession. The health care sector continues to grow and there's demand for almost every job in the industry. "There are no nurses looking for work," a spokeswoman for the American Nurses Association said.* The government and the energy sector have also been hiring. And while every state is suffering during the recession, some don't have significant unemployment rates: Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, South Dakota, and North Dakota.
Under the complex plan outlined by Geithner yesterday, the government would join forces with the private sector to purchase individual home loans as well as mortgage-backed securities. The Treasury will use up to $100 billion from the financial rescue funds already approved by Congress to match contributions made by private investors. The public-private ventures would get further help from the government through loans from the Federal Reserve and loan guarantees from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. These programs could buy as much as $1 trillion in public assets. In addition, the government could put $1 trillion more into the toxic assets by using the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, known as TALF, which will be expanded to finance existing troubled securities.
Investors were largely enthusiastic, or at least some were. Almost all the papers quote Bill Gross, the co-chief investment officer of Pimco, the nation's largest bond investor, calling the program "perhaps the first win-win-win policy to be put on the table." Investors do have plenty to be optimistic about since "the Treasury was offering to lend up to $6 for every $1 of investors' own money," as the NYT explains, which means taxpayers would lose the most if the investments turn sour. The WP, which is the most openly skeptical about the plan, says some analysts think the government may be handing out too much of the potential upside to investors when it should be going to the taxpayers. The program also involves a major risk considering that if the Treasury uses all of the $100 billion from the $700 billion bailout plan, there will only be $12 billion remaining, which means Geithner will have fewer options if another financial institution desperately needs cash to survive.
The WP and LAT highlight that the program simply might not work, considering that it's unclear how the government would persuade banks to sell assets if they see the prices as too low. USAT points out that in "prior situations in both the USA and abroad, governments have forced banks to sell their bad assets." The paper also says that the typical buyers of securities, such as hedge funds, don't have much cash lying around so it's likely that the biggest buyers would be so-called vulture investors, who would only be interested in the securities if they're real cheap, something banks may not be interested in since it'd mean they'd have to record big losses in their books.
The WSJ says there's currently "a chess match of sorts" that is playing out between banks and investors. Banking executives are reluctant to sell assets at a deep discount since that could force them to raise more capital. Experts say banks that have already taken write-downs on their assets could be more willing to accept a cheap price for their assets. The LAT quotes the lobbyist of a financial trade group who says that even if many banks refuse to participate, the program should at the very least determine a market price for toxic assets. A shortage of information on how much these assets might be worth is part of the reason why the credit markets have seized up over the last few months.
In a separate front-page piece the NYT says the positive reaction to the White House announcement gave the "embattled" treasury secretary "a critically needed boost." Even though Obama has been insisting that he has full faith in Geithner, he has suffered several missteps throughout his brief tenure, so it must have been more than a bit of a relief to see things go his way for once. Of course, there's no guarantee that the good feelings toward Geithner will continue, but it at least shows that the administration learned from the disastrous unveiling of the plan last month. This time around, the administration devoted lots of efforts to carefully releasing the plan over several days to key Wall Street insiders and obtaining endorsements from two leading global investment firms, BlackRock and Pimco. It's hardly a surprise then that these companies were ready with statements of support as soon as the plan was unveiled, which the media gobbled up.
In a piece inside, the LAT points out that one key difference between yesterday's announcement and the one in early February is that this time around, Geithner didn't make the announcement in front of TV cameras, and the administration "effectively reduced the secretary from point man to staff briefer." That fact may seem like a bit of inside baseball. After all, if investors liked what Geithner had to say, who cares how he said it? But it points to what the LAT calls the "worrisome fact" that besides Obama, the administration "has yet to find a commanding figure who can carry economic policy messages and inspire confidence in White House prescriptions."
The lack of a clear communicator on economic issues may be partly to blame for the dearth of explanations coming from the White House about what's going on and why certain plans were chosen over others. Inside, the WP points out that even as Wall Street celebrated, other experts were holding back and were expressing skepticism about the plan, noting there are several other ways to fix the system that could ultimately be more effective. But most also agreed they might be more open to the White House plan if the administration took a time out to explain things more carefully rather than presenting their decisions as the only viable choices. "I think they would inspire much more confidence if they explained their rationale," one expert said.
The WP fronts word that the White House is "considering asking Congress" to allow the treasury secretary to seize a whole slew of financial companies, including hedge funds and insurers, if their collapse would threaten the economy as a whole. Currently, the government only has the authority to seize banks. This would "mark a significant shift from the existing model of financial regulation" because someone in the president's Cabinet would have authority over companies that are currently overseen by a number of independent agencies. Geithner is set to talk about the issue today at hearing on Capitol Hill that will focus on the American International Group bonuses. Some think that if the government had been able to seize AIG when it was clear that the insurance giant was in trouble, the whole process of winding down its operations could have been cheaper for taxpayers. If the treasury secretary had this power, it could take a number of steps to prevent a firm's collapse, including, significantly, breaking contracts.
The NYT fronts, and everyone covers, news that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said that nine of the top 10 recipients of retention bonuses from American International Group agreed to give the money back. Cuomo said he's still working on convincing bonus recipients but so far has managed to get commitments to return $50 million of the $165 million that went to the insurer's Financial Products unit. Meanwhile, the Senate has put on hold the legislation that would have placed a large tax on bonuses. It seems lawmakers are willing to put the legislation aside for now, particularly since Obama expressed skepticism about the proposals.
In an op-ed piece in the LAT, President Obama writes that the "leaders of the G-20 have a responsibility to take bold, comprehensive and coordinated action that not only jump-starts recovery but launches a new era of economic engagement to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again." No country can hope to bring an end to the crisis in isolation, and that's why coming up with a coordinated strategy at next month's summit in London is so important. Countries must resist their protectionist impulses, and take this opportunity to "advance comprehensive reforms of our regulatory and supervisory framework."
The bad economy is sending people to the candy shop, reports the NYT. So-called "nostalgic candies" like Necco Wafers and Mallo Cups are particularly popular, and customers seem to prefer "cheaper, old-fashioned" sweets, which is a significant reversal from last year when mass-market candies were losing ground to luxury brands. Many candy makers are reporting surprisingly healthy profits and stores say they're struggling to keep up with demand. The owner of a candy store in San Francisco said it best: "All is well in candy land."
Correction, March 25, 2009: This article originally attributed a quote from a spokeswoman for the American Nurses Association to the head of that organization. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
The New York Times leads with the Obama administration's busy Sunday, when officials went on a charm offensive to try to convince private investors to participate in the government's long-awaited effort to remove troubled assets from banks' balance sheets. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will officially unveil the plan's details today, but officials were already out in full force yesterday to motivate private investors to take the handsome government subsidies and buy up the troubled assets. The Washington Post leads with key administration officials making it pretty clear that the White House isn't too happy about the idea of recovering bonuses through taxes. Although some of the administration's top economic officials were careful to emphasize that the public has a right to feel angry about the bonuses, they said it's not a good idea to use the tax code to target a small group of people.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, saying that she's "extremely confident" the U.S. economy will rebound within the next year. Republicans strongly disagree with this rosy diagnosis. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how Mexican drug cartels have become important players in the lucrative business of smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States. By taking over a business that had previously been operated largely by independent coyotes, drug cartels have made it more violent and dangerous. So far, Washington has largely ignored this side of their operations, preferring to focus on drug trafficking. USA Today leads with an Army inspector general's report that found the rules to determine whether a soldier is fit for combat are so confusing that they increase the likelihood that "soldiers who do not meet medical deployability requirements may be deployed in violation of one or more policies." The Army insists it's working on improving the process to ensure that everyone who gets sent to a combat zone meets all of the medical requirements.
Some investors are optimistic about joining forces with the government to buy up troubled assets, but others have been quick to tell administration officials that they're reluctant to participate due to recent controversy over the bonus payments at American International Group. The NYT talks to three heads of investment firms, who say the terms sound appealing (hardly surprising, considering that the government plans to "lend nearly 95 percent of the money for any investment"), but they're not jumping on the opportunity to participate out of fear of future regulation. Investors are asking the White House to guarantee that it won't be imposing compensation restrictions for participating firms. Administration officials went on the Sunday talk shows to try to convince Americans that there's a difference between companies that receive bailout money and investors who are participating in broad government programs. "What we're talking about now are private firms that are kind of doing us a favor," the White House's chief economist said.
Although Wall Street has been anxiously waiting for Geithner's plan, "the rollout comes at an inopportune time," notes the WSJ, pointing out that last week's outrage over the bonuses is making administration officials wary of appearing to pursue a plan that ultimately rewards Wall Street.
Despite all the sweet talking with investors, it's still unclear exactly how these troubled assets will be valued. Investors said the government still hasn't quite answered the question of how the prices will be reconciled, given what banks want for their toxic assets and what investors are willing to pay. The Treasury clearly believes these assets are now undervalued and the government plan will help create a market for them. "Over time, by providing a market for these assets that does not now exist, this program will help improve asset values, increase lending capacity by banks, and reduce uncertainty about the scale of losses on bank balance sheets," Geithner writes in an op-ed piece in the WSJ. Even as the administration works to fight off the current crisis, it's important to "also start the process of ensuring a crisis like this never happens again," notes Geithner, who adds that the "lack of an appropriate and modern regulatory regime and resolution authority helped cause this crisis."
As members of the world's leading economies prepare for the Group of 20 meeting on April 2, the WSJ fronts an interview with the president of the European Central Bank, who says European countries don't need to boost their spending in order to fight the downturn. The United States has been trying to convince European leaders to boost spending, but comments by Jean-Claude Trichet are sure to make that task even more difficult. Trichet said that instead of trying to get new spending, governments should be focusing on quickly implementing the policies they already have. "Decisions have been taken; they are very important," he said. "Let's do it! Quick implementation, quick disbursement is what is needed."
The WP fronts a look at how "flex time," which seemed to be all the rage just a little while ago, is slowly disappearing. When the economy was good, employees were eager to snap up options to telecommute or work different hours to balance their work and family obligations. The anecdotal piece says workers are now giving up these types of perks out of fear that they could give employers a good excuse to lay them off, and many are scared to even bring up the topic during such hard economic times. One expert says there's a "silent fright" among workers that is reminiscent of how women used to feel like they had to hide their family from employers. "That's what it feels like we're returning to. Work as many hours as you possibly can. Make yourself indispensable. Don't ever complain. Don't ever ask for anything," she said.
The LAT fronts the results of a study that found that teenagers who go to a school with a fast-food restaurant within walking distance have a higher probability of being obese. Researchers studied data from ninth-graders in California and discovered that if a school has a fast-food outlet within 530 feet, there is a 5.2 percent increase in the incidence of obesity. Older people don't seem to be as affected by a nearby temptation. "School kids are a captive audience. They can't go very far from school during lunch, but adults can get in their car and have more choices," one of the study's co-authors said.
The LAT fronts, and everyone covers, news that a small, single-engine plane that departed from California to Montana crashed and killed as many as 17 people. A mechanic at a California airport said there were about a dozen children onboard, ranging in age from 6 to 10. They appear to have been on a ski trip.
After reading the leaked details of Obama's bank rescue plan over the weekend, the NYT's Paul Krugman isn't happy with what he calls a recycling of the Bush administration's "cash for trash" plan. It almost seems as if the president wants "to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch." The Obama administration continues to insist that its plan will allow the market to set a fair price for the toxic assets, but the truth is that it's simply "an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets." The bottom line is that the plan simply won't work because "no amount of financial hocus-pocus" will change the fact that "financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble." Meanwhile, Obama is risking his credibility. "If this plan fails," writes Krugman, "it's unlikely that he'll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place."
Today's front pages herald the Obama administration's sweeping new measures to contain the financial crisis. The Washington Post leads with the Treasury Department's formation of a government body called the "Public Investment Corp." that will purchase approximately $1 trillion in so-called toxic assets. The New York Times leads with a call for increased oversight likely to come this week as part of a "sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation." That plan will seek a broad new role for the Federal Reserve in overseeing large companies. The Los Angeles Times leads with "one of the deadliest police shootings in California history," a routine traffic stop that eventually led to three officers being shot and killed yesterday in Oakland, Calif. The suspect, previously convicted for assault with a deadly weapon, was gunned down by SWAT officers two hours after the initial shootings.
The Treasury is pressing ahead with plans to buy up the $1 trillion worth of toxic assets still burdening the economy, the WP reports, though details of the new corporation that will do the purchasing are not finalized. The body will include private investors and the Federal Reserve, but the government will be sticking its neck out farthest, committing $75 billion to $100 billion from the original $700 billion rescue package. The administration says its goal is to "pursue compensation reform that addresses public outrage while maintaining stability in the financial system."
Prodded by this week's wave of outrage over bonuses paid to AIG executives, the Obama administration is also hurrying along its long-discussed plans to increase oversight of executive pay. Details are still under debate, the NYT reports, but the planned regulation might be presented in place of further legislation and will apply even to companies currently not receiving federal bailout money. The administration hopes to have the plan written up before an April G20 meeting, where improving corporate oversight is expected to be a hot topic.
Officials say the CIA's most expensive targeted killing program since Vietnam has been a success, according to a front-page LAT story. Predator missile strikes in Pakistan, dramatically increased since August of last year, have "taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust." The Bush administration decided in August 2008 to stop asking the Pakistani government for permission before launching missile strikes, leading to a nearly 400 percent increase in strikes from the previous two years combined. The Obama administration plans to continue the intensified offensive despite civilian casualities and protests from the Pakistani government.
Closer to home, the Obama administration is dispatching federal agents and equipment to the U.S.-Mexico border, the WP off-lead reports. The materials will assist Mexican president Felipe Calderón in his war against the vicious drug cartels benefiting from a steady stream of weapons and cash flowing across the border from the United States. License-plate readers, scales to weigh vehicles, and surveillance equipment will be headed to the border, and government officials are discussing ways to increase intelligence-sharing and military cooperation with Mexico.
The LAT fronts a less bloody war between self-promoting Hollywood events planner Brian Quintana and his celebrity patrons, many of whom he accuses of shocking—sometimes criminal—behavior. "If he is to be believed, actress Stefanie Powers sexually assaulted him, socialite Paris Hilton tried to wreck him professionally and movie producer Jon Peters solicited him to commit murder." Quintana, who claims connections to dozens of A-list celebrities, has been in and out of court with almost as many. The stars all scornfully dismiss him as another one of the parasitic Hollywood opportunists who make their lives miserable.
Sideways, a 2004 movie about two buddies on a wine-tasting road trip through California, will be uncorked in Japan, the NYT reports. It's the latest in a series of films being remade by American production companies eager to expand their reach into foreign markets. Sideways is an unlikely choice for a Japanese audience, but producers are rerouting the road trip to more recognizable California locations and plugging local wines with up-close shots of signs and labels. Alexander Payne, who directed the Oscar-nominated original, has given the new version his blessing.
A NYT essay attempts to unpack "political distractions," those bits of news, "seemingly side issues," that whip up national anger in matter of hours. The AIG bonuses are "small change" compared with hundreds of billions of dollars already spent on misbehaving financial institutions, but the outrage that exploded virtually overnight could end up derailing parts of Obama's agenda. Political distractions are often manufactured by the opposition, but "the ones that pose the greatest political danger are those that seem to erupt spontaneously, crossing political boundaries by putting a president at odds with his own party."
An essay in the WP warns against the European social model, which the author says removes the human spirit from the stuff of life. Jobs are protected, wealth distributed, and recreation assured, but "human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible." Social policy based on that premise makes for an environment "inimical to human flourishing."
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal lead with details of the administration's anticipated plan (sketched out by the Los Angeles Times on Monday) for a $1 trillion public-private partnership designed to coax investors to rescue troubled assets from banks. Complicating that picture, the Washington Post leads with the Congressional Budget Office's new projection that, under the current economic rescue plan, annual deficits will force the federal government to borrow fully a third more than the administration had earlier forecast. The Los Angeles Times brings it home with a lead story on African-American unemployment in California and nationally, where 13.4 percent of blacks don't have jobs—disproportionately in low-skill sectors—compared with the 8.1 percent average.
In rotten timing for the administration (which only the LAT had in yesterday's print edition), the CBO came out with a staggering analysis of how far in hoc the United States is expected to be in 10 years under President Obama's budget proposal: After borrowing $9.3 trillion, the national debt would amount to a whopping 82 percent of the size of the economy. That prognosis is gloomier by $2.3 trillion than the administration had let on, which White House budget director and former CBO chief Peter Orszag chalked up to a different calculus for how far the economy has yet to fall. Regardless of who's right, the new numbers have sent pro-administration legislators scrambling to hold together alliances already tied together with a shoestring in order to keep the stimulus on track. One controversial strategy: In order to pass a health care bill, House Democrats may be able to utilize a rule that would get the legislation through on a simple majority vote, whereas before it would need 60 votes to cut off debate.
The administration's toxic asset disposal plan, officially debuting next week, has three main elements (unavoidable jargon alert!): The Treasury brings a handful of investment firms onboard to raise private capital on a dollar-for-dollar matching basis with federal money, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sets up and largely funds investment partnerships to buy the assets at auction, and more money is funneled through the Federal Reserve-managed Term Asset-Backed Secure Lending Facility. All that is supposed to then free up banks to resume normal lending, but the Journal takes a skeptical investor's-eye view, noting that banker types are smarting from the AIG bonus backlash and leery of the administration's demonstrated tendency to change the rules on bailout deals. The paper also lands heavily on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, saying this plan may be his last, best chance to make an impact on the crisis.
Meanwhile, Congress is starting to get blowback for the massive taxes on corporate compensation proposed in the House on Thursday. Chief executives are mobilizing to head off the move, reassuring remaining employees that they won't let the government ax bonuses completely, which the banks say would result in a loss of talented workers to smaller companies. According to the LAT, the outrage-fueled, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink tax plans have scared the bejesus out of not just the likes of Merrill and AIG but also comparatively healthy firms up and down Wall Street, who fear they might be tarred with the same brush. Back on the NYT business page, Joe Nocera calls for sanity, contending that the rhetorical windstorm over AIG malfeasance is distorting the political response to the financial crisis, which he fears may pose a bigger risk to recovery than economic problems on their own.
President Obama himself is seeking to reassure the American people that all that stimulus money won't be wasted; requests for funding must be made in writing. One of those seeking cash is World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein, with the cooperation of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which just wants to see planned towers get built after the developer hit a rough patch in financing his highly symbolic mega-project. And further down the ladder still, the NYT fronts a heartbreaker from the economic front lines—this time, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.—illustrating that the young are in a battle with the elderly workers whose deflated 401(k)s have forestalled retirement.
To kick off the day's noneconomic news! The Post fronts a look at how Obama's three-minute video message to Iran played in the foreign policy community yesterday: While recognizing the break from Bush's axis-of-evil rhetoric, Iranian officials didn't appreciate the decision to speak over their heads in such a public way. "Statesmen address each other, instead of talking to the people," said one military figure. The message came in advance of a probable face-to-face meeting between Iranian leaders and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the NYT reports, and may force hard-liners to—in the Gray Lady's own sainted words—"put up or shut up."
The Post features a pair of newly minted bureaucrats—relatively uncontroversial nominations nevertheless held up by Senate politicking—poised to have an impact on policy via their respective roles on climate change. Jane Lubchenco, the first woman ever to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, plans to wield her significantly boosted budget in the service of comprehensive climate monitoring. And the new guy at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, is getting cracking on one of Obama's job-creation devices, a new "smart grid" to help integrate decentralized renewable energy sources.
Yes, it's still going on: A judge is expected to render a decision soon in the five-month recount dogfight between Norm Coleman and Al Franken in Minnesota. Within days, the Senate could be complete, and the worst post-election overtime since Bush v. Gore finally at an end. In other news of representation, it sounds like the citizens of D.C. are facing a strangely incongruous Sophie's choice: Legislation currently before Congress would grant the District a representative in the House (offset by another in comfortably Republican Utah) while weakening its gun control laws.
Six years after the American invasion, Iraq is now (almost) safe for tourism again, with the first civilian recreational tour group out to see the sights. Not so much in Afghanistan, where an American commander says he's fresh out of troops needed to secure the area, and folks should just expect more things to go wrong in the region.
So it's a rough world out there, and as the LAT tells us, college students are preparing themselves with that great leveler of a decision-making exercise: rock, paper, scissors.
As anyone who has talked or e-mailed with me in the last couple of months knows, my obsession with Friday Night Lights has become sort of embarrassing. My husband, David, and I came to the show late, by way of Netflix, but were hooked after Episode 1. We started watching two, three, four in one sitting. It began to seem to me as if these characters were alive and moving around in my world.
David was happy with the football. I was into the drama. I worried about Smash, the sometimes-unstable star running back. I dreamed about Tyra, who was being stalked. When I talked to my own daughter, I flipped my hair back, just as Coach's wife, Tami Taylor, does and paused before delivering nuggets of wisdom. Once or twice, I even called David "Coach."
I was all set to watch Season 3 in real time when I heard, to my horror, that it might not get made. But then NBC cut a weird cost-sharing kind of deal with DirecTV, and the Dillon Panthers are back in business. The episodes have already aired on satellite, but I don't have a dish. So I'm just now settling in for the new season.
But did I miss something? The field lights are on again in Dillon, Texas, but the whole town seems to be suffering from a massive bout of … amnesia. The previous season ended abruptly, after seven episodes got swallowed by the writer's strike. For Season 3, the writers just wipe the slate clean and start again. Murder? What murder? Landry is back to being the high-school sidekick, and we can just forget that whole unfortunate body-dragged-out-of-the-river detour. Tyra got a perm and is running for school president. Lyla Garrity's preacher boyfriend, rival to Tim Riggins, has disappeared.
Over the last season, the show was struggling for an identity. It veered from The ABC Afterschool Special to CSI and then finally found its footing in the last couple of episodes, especially the one where Peter Berg—who directed the movie adaptation of Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights and adapted it for TV—walked on as Tami Taylor's hyper ex-boyfriend. In Season 3, the show is trying on yet another identity. Mrs. Taylor has suddenly turned into Principal Taylor. With her tight suits and her fabulous hair, she is Dillon's own Michelle Rhee, holding meetings, discussing education policy, and generally working too hard. Meanwhile, Coach keeps up the domestic front, making breakfast for Julie with one hand while feeding baby Grace with the other.
This strikes me as a little too close to home, and not in a way I appreciate. The beauty of Friday Night Lights is that it managed to make us care about the tiny town of Dillon. It drew us in with football but then sunk us into town life. The show took lots of stock types not usually made for prime time—a car dealer, an arrogant black kid, an ex-star in a wheelchair, a grandma with dementia, a soldier, lots of evangelical Christians—and brought them to life. It was neither sentimental nor mocking, which is a hard thing to pull off.
Now I feel as if I'm looking in a mirror. Tami is a mom juggling work and kids and not doing such a good job. Coach is trying his best at home but screwing up. The only town folk we see in the first episode are Tim's brother and Tyra's sister, drunkenly falling all over each other in a bar—the sorriest, white-trashiest bar you can imagine. Our heart is with Tyra, who, just like the children of the show's upscale fans, is trying to go to college. The final, inspirational scene of the episode takes place in a racquetball court. At least Smash has the good sense to note that it's the whitest sport in America.
That said, Friday Night Lights would have to do a lot to lose my loyalty. Just the fact that there was a high-drama plotline centered on the Jumbotron is enough to keep me happy. It's one of the show's great gifts, humor in unexpected places. Like when Tim's brother, looking half drunk as always, tells him Lyla will never respect him because he's a "rebound from Jesus." I'll give this season a chance.
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Hey there, Hanna and Meghan,
While we're complaining, isn't this the third year that some of these characters—Tim, Lyla, Tyra—have been seniors? The producers seemed to be dealing with this small lapse in planning by bringing on the soft lighting and lipstick. Tim looks ever more like Matt Dillon in The Outsiders (not to sound like that thirtysomething mom who was shagging him in the first season).
But I'm letting these objections go. I fell for this opener once Coach and Mrs. Coach had one of those moments that make their marriage a flawed gem.
You're right, Hanna, that the Taylors seem more like a typical two-career family as we watch Eric tending the baby while Tami comes home at 9:45 at night, tired from her new job as principal. Also, her sermon about how broke the school is descended into liberal pablum (real though it surely could be). But it's all a setup for a sequence that makes this show a not-idealized, and thus actually useful, marriage primer. He tries to sweet-talk her. She says, with tired affection, "Honey, you're just trying to get laid." Then she realizes that he's signed off on a bad English teacher for their daughter Julie and starts hollering at both of them. Oh, how I do love Tami for losing her temper, snapping at her teenager, and yelling loudly enough to wake her baby. And I love the writers for bringing it back around with a follow-up scene in which Mrs. Coach tells her husband she's sorry, and he says, "I could never be mad at my wife. It's that damn principal." Way to compartmentalize.
Much as I appreciate Tami, I'm puzzled by a weird gap in her life: She doesn't have girlfriends. I know that her sister showed up last season, but that doesn't really explain the absence of female friends. In fact, it's a pattern on the show: Julie's friend Lois is more a prop than a character, Lyla never hangs out with other girls, and although Tyra occasionally acts like a big sister to Julie, she doesn't seem to have a close girlfriend, either. Does this seem as strange to you as it does to me? In Lyla's case, I can see it—she often acts like the kind of girl other girls love to hate (and I look forward to dissecting why that's so). But Tami is the kind of largehearted person whom other women would want to befriend. The lack of female friendships on the show has become like a missing tooth for me, especially when you consider the vivid and interesting male friendships (Matt and Landry, Tim and Jason, even Coach and Buddy Garrity). It's revealing in its absence: No matter how good the show's writers are at portraying women—and they are—they're leaving out a key part of our lives.
A question for both of you: What do you think of the surly version of Matt Saracen? I'm starting to feel about him as I felt at the end of the fifth Harry Potter book: past ready for the nice boy I thought I knew to come back.
Emily
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Hanna, Emily,
For me, the genius of Friday Night Lights is the way it captures the texture of everyday life by completely aestheticizing it. The handheld camera, the quick jump-cuts, the moody Explosions in the Sky soundtrack laid over tracking shots of the flat, arid West Texas landscape all add up to a feeling no other TV show gives me. And very few movies, for that matter. Then there's the fact that FNL, more than any other show on network TV, tries hard to be about a real place and real people in America. This is no Hollywood stage set; it's not a generic American city or suburb; the characters aren't dealing with their problems against a backdrop of wealth, security, and Marc Jacobs ads. Most are struggling to get by, and at any moment the floor might drop out from under them. In this sense, the show is about a community, not about individuals. Football is an expression of that community.
That's why, Emily, I don't find surly Matt Saracen annoying; I find him heartbreaking. After all, his surliness stems from predicaments that he has no control over: a father in Iraq (how many TV shows bring that up?) and an ailing grandmother he doesn't want to relegate to a nursing home. Like many Americans, he finds himself acting as a caretaker way too young. And because he's not wealthy, when his personal life gets complicated—like when his romance with his grandmother's sexy at-home nurse, Carlotta, goes belly up—he loses it. (OK, I thought that story line was kinda lame; but I was moved by the anger that followed.) But your point about the lack of female friendships on the show is a great one. It's particularly true of Tami. (We do get to see a reasonable amount of Julie and Tyra together, I feel.) Like Julie, I had a principal for a mother, and one thing I always liked was watching all her friendships at the school develop and evolve.
It's also true, Hanna, that the first episode of this season hammers homes its themes—Tami's an overworked principal with a funding problem; Lyla and Riggins are gonna have trouble taking their romance public; and star freshman quarterback J.D. is a threat to good old Matt Saracen. But for now I didn't mind, because there were plenty of moments of fine dialogue, which keep the show feeling alive. Like the scene in which the amiable, manipulative Buddy hands Tami a check and says in his twangy drawl, "Ah've got two words for you: Jumbo … Tron!" (Tami, of course, has just been trying to meet a budget so tight that even chalk is at issue.) Later, at a party, Buddy greets Tami in front of some of the Dillon Panther boosters—who are oohing and aahing over an architectural rendering of the JumboTron—by exclaiming, "Tami Taylor is the brain child behind all this!" Ah, Buddy. You gotta love him. He's almost a caricature—but not.
What keeps a lot of these characters from being caricatures, despite plenty of conventional TV plot points, is that ultimately the show portrays them in the round. Coach Taylor, who has a way with young men that can seem too good to be true, is also often angry and frustrated; caring and sensitive, Lyla is also sometimes an entitled priss; Tim is a fuckup with a heart of gold (at least, at times); and the raw and exposed Julie can be a whiny brat. In this sense, ultimately, I think the story FNL is trying to tell is fundamentally responsible, unlike so many stories on TV. When the characters make mistakes, they suffer real consequences. Think of Smash losing his football scholarship. I sometimes think the weakest feature of our entertainment culture is a kind of sentimentality about pain, if that makes sense—an avoidance of the messiness of life that manifests itself in tidy morals and overdramatized melodramas.
But what could make FNL better? I'm hoping for more football and atmosphere and fewer overwrought plotlines. Will the J.D./Matt Saracen face-off help this story, do you think? And, finally: Can the writers of the show figure out how to dramatize games without making them seem totally fake? It feels like so often in the last five minutes of an episode we cut to a game-that's-in-its-final-minutes-and-oh-my-God-everyone-is-
biting-their-nails …
Meghan
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That's it, Meghan. What the Sopranos accomplished with tight thematic scripts and the Wire accomplished with a Shakespearean plot, FNL pulls off with moody music and some interesting camera work. It's not that these shows transform brutal realities into beauty. They just make them bearable by packaging them in some coherent aesthetic way that calls attention to itself. And the result is very moving.
The inside of Tim Riggins' house, for example, is a place that should never be shown on television. It's a total mess, and not in an artsy Urban Outfitter's catalogue kind of way. There's that bent-up picture of a bikini beer girl by the television and yesterday's dishes and napkins on every surface and nothing in the refrigerator except beer. This is a very depressing state of affairs for a high school kid if you stop to think about it. But whenever we're in there, the camera jerks around from couch to stool to kitchen, in perfect harmony with the chaos around it. So it all feels comfortable and we experience it just the way Riggins would—another day in a moody life.
I think part of the reason Peter Berg doesn't see these characters from such a distance is that he seems deeply sympathetic to their outlook on life, particularly their ideas about the traditional roles of men and women. The men are always being put through tests of their own manhood and decency. The boys have Coach, but hardly any of them has an actual father, so they are pushed into manhood on their own. Almost all of them have to be head of a household before their time, with interesting results. Matt is decent but can't fill the shoes. Riggins is noble but erratic. Smash is dutiful but explosive.
Emily, that insight you had about Tami is so interesting, and it made me see the whole show differently. At first I thought Peter Berg must love women, because they drive all the action and make all the good decisions. Then, after what you said, I realized that for the most part, the women exist only to support the men. They are wives or girlfriends or mothers but don't have many independent relationships outside their own families. Judd Apatow's women are a little like this, too. It's a male-centric view, and helps explain why a Hollywood director would be so in tune with the mores of a small conservative town.
It's also why this season could get interesting. As the principal, Tami is stretching the show in all kinds of ways. Buddy has shed his vulnerability and is back to being the town bully. Coach is stuck in the middle. All kinds of potential for drama.
Meghan, thank you for reminding me of all the good reasons why Matt Saracen is a heartbreaking nice boy rather than a feel-good one. And now Episode 2 reminds us as well. Matt's grandmother doesn't want to take her medication, and the only way he can make her is to become an emancipated minor so that he can be her legal guardian, instead of the other way around. And then what exactly happens when it's time for him to go to college? No good answer. As, indeed, there wouldn't be.
One of the luxuries of adolescence is that you don't have to assume responsibility for the people in your family. Matt knows what it means to take this on. In the first season, he let Julie see him pretend to be his grandfather so he could sing his grandmother to sleep. Now when she asks whether emancipation means that he gets to "vote and drink and smoke," he brings her down to earth: "No, it means I get to take care of old people."
This is one of the moments that, for me, capture the strength of this show: In Dillon, kids with hard lives and kids with easier ones get a good look at each other, which doesn't happen all that much in our nation's class-segregated high schools. Lyla, Tim, and Tyra had one of those across-the-class-divide moments in this episode, when Lyla tried to get Tim to help himself with his college prospects at a fancy dinner and failed. Tim then came home and sat down in boxers to TV and a beer with Tyra while his brother and her sister snuck in a quickie (off-camera in the bedroom).
I was glad to see that the writers are back to making Tyra and Tim and their weary, beery sense of their own limitations the center of our sympathy. Maybe Tyra will make it out of Dillon, but not by acting like the Zeta girls in The House Bunny. And it seems entirely in keeping with Tim's fragile nature that Buddy Garrity could destroy his confidence with a few slashing sentences. Speaking of, one of the honest and realistic assumptions of this show is that when teenagers date, they have sex. So I gave Buddy points when he warned his daughter away from Tim in a speech that ended with "Lyla, are you using protection?"
But enough about character development. Let's talk about some football. I entirely agree, Meghan, that FNL generally gives us too little gridiron, not too much. But in this episode, there is a lovely sequence on the field. Coach Taylor is testing Smash before a college tryout, and the former Panther star is cutting and weaving just like old times—until Tim levels him. We hear the crack and thud of the hit, and, for a moment, Smash lies heavy and still on the ground. In this show, when a player goes down, the dots connect to the paralyzing hit that put Jason Street in a wheelchair. But Smash gets up, his rehabilitated knee sound, and it's a moment of blessed relief, because now we can go on rooting for him to regain his chance to … play in college and turn pro? To write the sentence is to remember how long the odds are for such an outcome and to rue the role that the dangled dream of professional sports ends up playing for a lot of kids.
Given Jason's broken spine, you can't accuse Friday Night Lights of pretending otherwise. But what do we think about the way its best characters revel in the game and make us love it, too? I ask myself the same question when I watch football with my sons knowing that I'd never let them play it. In the nonfiction book on which the show is based, author Buzz Bissinger writes of a player who wasn't examined thoroughly after a groin injury: "He lost the testicle but he did make All-State." There are also kids who play through broken arms, broken ankles, and broken hands and who pop painkillers or Valium. Across the country, high-school football is also associated with a frightening rate of concussions. Would you let Coach Taylor anywhere near your boys?
Indeed, Emily. It's a hallelujah moment when we're back to Tim, Tyra, Matt, the lovable, evil Buddy, and all the other things I treasure about FNL. This episode made me very hopeful about the rest of the season. I especially liked the Smash subplot and how it ties together what happens on the field with what happens off. Smash, who graduated but lost his college scholarship, is having a hard time remembering how to be Smash. Without the Dillon Panthers, he's just a kid in an Alamo Freeze hat who goes home every night to his mom. And that just about summarizes the driving theme of the show. On the field, class, race, and all the soul-draining realities of life in a small Texas town get benched. But off the field, you can have clear eyes and a full heart and still lose.
Despite their best efforts, Matt, Tyra, and Tim just can't seem to transcend. Instead of gender differences, what's emerging strongly this season is, as Emily points out, class differences. All the couples in the show are divided along class lines, setting up lots of potential for good drama. There's Tyra and Landry, Lyla and Tim, and possibly Julie and Matt again. Emily, you pointed out that great moment in the car where Julie and Matt have such different ideas about what the future holds. Buddy gives us another such moment, when he lectures Lyla about dating Tim: "Tim Riggins going to college is like me teaching yoga classes." (I'm having trouble getting that image out of my mind, of Buddy Garrity teaching yoga classes. Buddy in downward facing dog. Buddy ohm-ing. Buddy saying "namaste" to his ex-wife in a spirit of love and peace.)
Then, of course, there's the absolutely awful moment when Tim orders squab, rare, at the dinner with the new freshman quarterback J.D.'s posh Texas socialite family. This was reminiscent of one of my favorite scenes in The Wire, when Bunny Colvin takes Namond and the other kids out to a fancy restaurant, after which they feel ever more alienated from their better selves.
I have high hopes for J.D. in this regard. He turns the Dillon Panthers formula on its head. His father is hellbent on mucking up the field with privilege and influence. He's a serious test for Coach and for Matt. Can't wait to see what happens.
One question, though: Does it seem right to you that Tim Riggins would use the word schmooze? Seemed out of place to me. (Ditto their conversations about Google.) It's not that I think he's "retarded," as he puts it. It's just that until now, the show has been intentionally claustrophobic, locking us in the town, never letting us see what's on Tim's TV (unlike, say, Tony Soprano, whose TV is always facing us). So we've been led to believe that Dillon reception doesn't pick up the CW or VH1 or any other channel that might infect teenage lingo.
Hanna, Emily,
One thing I've been thinking about is Friday Night Lights' distinctive brand of male sentimentality. This show seems singularly designed to make men cry. Its lodestars are comradeship on and off the field ("God, football, and Texas forever," I recall Riggins toasting with Jason Street in the very first episode); a modern blend of paradoxically stoic emotionalism (epitomized by Coach Taylor); and a recurrent, choked-up love of the tough women who make these men's attachment to football possible. This may be the West, but in Dillon, Texas, John Ford's American masculinity has been diluted with a cup of New Man sensitivity.
Take this episode's key scene between Matt Saracen and his grandmother: Debating whether to take his ailing grandmother to an assisted-living home, Matt is shaken when she suddenly tells him how great he was in his last game. She spirals into loving reminiscence:
"You've always loved football, Matty. I remember when you were two years old you were trying to throw a football, and it was bigger than you were. And you were such a sweet baby, such a sweet, sweet baby. But here you are all grown up and taking care of everything. I don't know what I'd do without you. I don't know. Matthew, I love you."
"I know. I love you too, Grandma."
"You're such a good boy."
"If I am, it's only because you raised me."
The scene is very well-played—we haven't talked much about the show's acting yet, it suddenly occurs to me—replete with pauses and tears and a final hug between the two. But the emotion derives from a move in the script that occurs again and again in this series: A man is having a difficult time when his mother, his grandmother, or his wife describes how much it means to her that he is taking care of her, or accomplishing brilliant things on the field, or just plain persevering. Smash has had moments like this with his mom. Coach has moments like this with Tami. And here Matt is reminded of his duty—to take care of his grandma, even though he's 17—when she speaks about his masculine prowess, first as a tough little boy throwing a ball "bigger than you were" and now as a tough teenager trying to navigate another task much bigger than he is.
Friday Night Lights has gotten more sentimental over the years, I think, not less, and it has also embraced its women characters more than ever. (I'm not sure I think they really play second fiddle to the men, Hanna—though they once did.) The show is about relationships now; its investigation of male honor has made a quarter-turn to focus largely on male honor as it pertains to women. (Even wayward Tim Riggins has been domesticated.)
In this regard, the show is far more incantatory than realistic (to borrow Susan Sontag's labels for the two main types of art). That is, it trades on magic and ritual more than on gritty realism, even while it often pretends to be grittily realistic. And so while it does talk about class, unlike many network TV shows, and while it does portray a place that's geographically specific, as I mentioned in my last entry, it's also offering up a highly stylized story that is intended, I think, to serve as an emotional catharsis for men, while winning women over by showing that men really do have feelings, and it's going to translate them into a grammar we can begin to understand.
I like this episode, but it strikes me that we've come a long way from season one, when there was a bit more edge on things. (Remember how it almost seemed that Riggins was racist?)
And we're definitely a long way from Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights, on which the series and the movie are based. That book—so far, at least; I'm only 150 pages in—has plenty of sentimentality about the power of athletic glory to alleviate the mundanity of life off the field. But it also stresses the meanness and nastiness that fuels the talent of so many of the actual Panthers Bissinger met. Not to mention the racism that pervaded the town. On this show, we rarely see that meanness; Riggins used to embody it, but now he's a pussycat, trying on blazers to keep Lyla happy. On the field, it's the team's pure-hearted sportsmanship that makes it so lovable, not any player's manly violence. After all, their locker-room mantra is "Clear eyes, full hearts can't lose." And in Matt Saracen they had a scrappy quarterback underdog who really wanted to be an artist. Even J.D. is small and—can't you see it in those wide eyes?—supersensitive.
I love FNL, but sometimes I wonder: Is the show becoming simply too sentimental about its characters?
Meghan
You're right, Meghan, to call FNL on its spreading dollop of sentimentality. Doesn't this often happen with TV shows in later seasons? I'm thinking of The Wire (at least Season 5), and probably The Sopranos, too. You can see why the writers would be pulled in this direction. The friction of the initial plot line has been played out. As the writers—and the audience—get to know the characters better, do we inevitably want them to become better people? Even if that comes at the price of narrative tension and edge?
The best way out of the mush pit, I suppose, is to introduce new characters, who in turn introduce new friction. That's what J.D. is all about this season. If you're right that there's a puppy dog lurking behind his wide eyes, then the show is in trouble. On the other hand, if he's merely a two-dimensional touchdown-throwing automaton, that's going to be awfully pat—the Matt vs. J.D. contest will be good, humble working-class vs. evil, proud, and rich. I hope we get something more interesting than that.
In the meantime, a complaint from me that I see a reader in "the Fray" shares: Why does this show keep flunking TV Drama 101 by tossing characters without explanation? First Waverly, Smash's bipolar girlfriend, disappears. Now Jason Street, whom we last saw begging an appealing waitress to have his baby after a one-night stand, is AWOL. What gives? Will Jason show up later this season, child in hand?
One more thing for this week: Another Frayster who says he (I think he) wrote for the show in the first season reports that Tami initially did have a girlfriend, played by Maggie Wheeler. But she got cut. More here. And more from us next week.
I'm glad that you pulled out that comment from the "Fray," Emily. I've wondered the same thing about why the show so baldly ditches characters. Another one to add to the list: Landry's nerd-cool girlfriend. Whatever happened to her? Meanwhile, we know from entertainment news that the actors who play Street (Scott Porter) and Smash (played by Gaius Charles Williams) are going to leave the show, but I presume the writers will stage their exits with more grace.
At last, though, the season is swinging into gear. There's conflict. Tami and Eric's strong bond is fraying under the pressure of balancing work and home. He: "You know who I miss? The coach's wife." She: "You know who I'd like to meet? The principal's husband." There's love. How sweet are Matt Saracen and Julie? Somehow their romance got more real this time around. I find her much less annoying and more credible in her big-eyed, pouting awkwardness. E.g., that moment where she timidly says "We don't have to talk about football… or not." There's football. Again with the game being decided in a close call in the last 20 seconds?
Plus, Tami finally has a friend. Or does she? At the butcher counter of the supermarket, she's befriended by Katie McCoy, J.D.'s mother, wife of Joe—the man I love to hate. (I think I'd watch this season just for the catharsis of watching Coach Taylor stick it to Joe. Kyle Chandler is brilliant in these scenes—check out the way the small muscles around his eyes and mouth move.) It's not clear whether Katie is working Tami just as Joe has been trying to work Eric, plying him with scotch and cigars to no avail. Eric takes the cynical view; he thinks Tami's being "played." Tami protests. Hanna, Emily, I wonder what you two think—is this a friendship in the bud, or a cynical play for power?
In either case, what's interesting to me is that it does seem more plausible for Tami and Katie to develop a friendship than for Joe and Eric to. As unalike as they are, Tami and Katie have something to offer each other. The women may be divided by class, but they connect subtly and intuitively, it seems, over understanding just how the other has to negotiate delicately around her husband to get what she wants for herself and her kids. As different as these marriages are, this, at least, seems alike. Even Tami, who has so much authority with Eric, has to push back in all sorts of ways. Take their argument about the football team's barbecue. It reminded me how new Tami's life as a working mom is: She complains to Eric about the team coming into the house and "messing up my floors" and "clogging up my toilet." That my is so telling. The long shadow of domesticated female identity falls over it. … Or am I reading too much into it?
Finally, I was struck by how many scenes in this episode take place between two people. The party scene, the football game, and the fabulous, cringe-inducing scene when Lyla laughs at Mindy for using Finding Nemo as a bridal vow are exceptions, of course. But otherwise the show takes place in dyads, as if homing in on relationships rather than community as a whole. I wonder if this will extend through the show.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Meghan
Yes, Meghan, Tami is being played by Katie McCoy. In part because she wants to be. I found their pairing off all too recognizable: They have that spark two women get when they see something in each other that they want and don't have. Their friendship, or maybe it will prove an infatuation, is a trying-on of identity. So, yes, Katie is using Tami to entrench her son's status on the team and to show off her wealth. And Tami refuses to notice, because it suits her purposes not to. A party at Katie's house means no clogged toilets at Tami's (and, oh yes, that my rang in my ears, too). I particularly loved the moment when Tami enters Katie's glittering, ostentatious house and her new friend and hostess puts an arm around her waist and they sail off together into the living room in their evening dresses, husbands trailing after them. It captured exactly how women are made girlish by mutual crushes.
Tami's falling for Katie would be harmless enough if it weren't clashing with her husband's interests. It's that willingness to clash that's new, isn't it? And captured so well by that great exchange you quoted. The Taylors haven't just become a two-career couple. They're a couple with jobs that are at loggerheads.
The Tami-Katie spark was connected, for me, with the Lyla-Mindy debacle, in part because both of these dyads cut across class, a theme we've been discussing. Tami and Katie are flirtingly using each other; Lyla and Mindy miss each other completely, in a way that causes real pain. How could Lyla have laughed at those poor, sweet Finding Nemo wedding vows? I mean, really. Then again, Lyla is completely out of her element, sitting there with two sisters and a mother who present a fiercely united front, at least to other people. Maybe she was nervous and blew it. Or maybe she wanted to hurt them because she envies their sisterhood.
And now a few questions, for you and for our readers. What happened at the end of that football game? Did Matt really fumble, or did he get a bad call—after all, it looked to me like he was in the end zone with control of the ball before he was hit. And was the pounding Matt took during the game just the show's latest realist depiction of the perils of football, or were we supposed to suspect that J.D.'s father had somehow induced the other team to take out QB 1? (I'm probably being paranoid, but the camera work had a sinister element to it.) Last thing: When J.D. catches Matt and Julie making fun of his trophies and comes back with that too-perfect zinger about how his parents also bronzed his diapers, is he just trying to make them feel small and stupid? Or is he also distancing himself from his parents and their pushy football worship? I couldn't quite decide how to read him in that moment.
I read the relationship between Tami and Katie differently. Katie is obviously awful, with her blather about the Atkins diet and being a "connector." She is obviously playing Tami, as much for her husband's sake as for her own. And the fact that Tami doesn't see this is a sign that her judgment is off. Until this season, Tami has been the moral compass for her family and for the show. But now she's distracted. She's cutting corners, ducking out of her domestic responsibilities. She's worried about those clogged toilets, because her cup is full, and she can't handle one more thing.
I empathize. When I'm in that too-much-work-too-many-kids-mode, I, too, lose it over minor housekeeping infractions. But it does not bode well for Dillon. When Tami is off, so is everything else. I read this episode as not so much about friendship, expedient or otherwise, as about missed connections. Tami is not picking up on Katie's cues. Lyla can't connect with Mindy and Billy. Tim Riggins does not make it on time to meet his date. And Saracen doesn't quite get that touchdown. The center is not holding in Dillon.
In David Simon's scripts for The Wire, money always crushes love, loyalty, family, neighborhood, and everything in its path. Something like that is going on here. Money is wreaking havoc in Dillon: the boosters' money for the JumboTron, the McCoy money, those copper wires that are hypnotizing Billy and making him corrupt poor Tim. (In The Wire, Bubs was always hunting down copper.) The result is the closing scene, which shows the very un-neighborly Dillon ritual of planting "for sale" signs on the coach's lawn after he loses the game.
I don't know what will triumph in the end: money or love. Emily, I couldn't tell either whether J.D. was pissed or chagrined or ironic in that last scene, so I can't tell if he's our villain or just a victim of his overbearing father. I'll bet on one thing though: Things do not end well for Billy Riggins.
Hanna, Emily,
I thought J.D. was trying to make a joke that didn't come off. It's my guess, too, that we're not supposed to be able to read his reaction, because he's not sure himself. He's angry, but he also sees the ridiculousness of his parents' shrine to him. One thing we haven't discussed: With the McCoys comes the FNL's first depiction of that modern affliction known as helicopter parenting. I suppose, to be accurate, that Joe is actually a more specific type: a form of stage parent, the obsessed parent-coach. Here is a parent who is helping drive his son into developing his talents but who also just might drive him crazy by pushing too hard.
This introduces a new theme for FNL, right? Until now, over-involvement wasn't a problem for any of the parents on the show. In fact, the parenting problems all had to do with moms and dads who were notably absent (in the case of Matt and Tim, say). Tami and Eric are attentive parents. So is Smash's mom. But you couldn't call them helicopter parents, that breed of nervously hovering perfectionists who busily cram their children's schedules with activities and lessons. In this case, that finicky sense of entitlement projected by Joe is associated, we're meant to feel, with his wealth, to get back to what you brought up, Hanna, about money and love. Katie, too. I'm curious to know how far the sports parenting issues will go. Is J.D. going to crack up? Or is Joe creating a sports equivalent of Mozart with all his proud pushing? I suspect the first, mainly because Joe is portrayed as such a jerk. (This dilemma might be more interesting if the writers had let Joe be a more complex figure—but maybe the whole point is these types are caricatures, almost.)
Meghan
This opening comment is aimed more at the producers of Friday Night Lights than at both of you: Tami is a stabilizing force in this crazy world, and there is only so much more of her fumbling and humiliation I can take. This episode ruminates on the ancient male art of mentoring, and particularly being a "molder of men," as Tami puts it to her husband. Tami tries to access this secret world with disastrous results. She knows that Buddy Garrity just played golf with the superintendent of schools, who is making the final decision on what to do with the JumboTron money. So on the advice of the wily Katie McCoy, she finds out where the superintendent has breakfast and pays a visit. "Wear your hair down," Katie tells her. "Wear it down."
Tami shows up in a fetching sunset-colored tank with her fabulous hair down. The superintendent is friendly enough but not overly so, and Tami pushes her luck. She scooches into his booth and immediately starts hammering him about having all the "information" and being "understaffed" and drill, drill, drill. This is not the giggly seduction scene Katie was hinting at. The whole exchange goes south quickly, and a few scenes later, the new JumboTron is announced. My husband and I had a very Venus/Mars moment over this scene. David says the superintendent was against her from the start. I say he was just friendly enough that she could have turned him if she'd played it exactly right. But I can't be annoyed at her, because playing it right—Katie McCoy's way—would have meant smiling coyly and batting her eyelashes in a very un-Tami fashion.
David, meanwhile, choked up at a scene that played out exactly the opposite way. Eric brings Smash to a big Texas university for a walk-on, but then the coach there says he doesn't have time to see him that day. Eric plays it perfectly. He finds just the right words to win over the coach and just the right words to send Smash soaring onto the field. David was so moved by the speech aimed at Smash that he watched it two more times.
In a show that so highly values male honor, being a "molder of men" is a serious compliment. Actual fatherhood in this show is secondary to the art of shaping a fine young man. We get a glimpse into the fragile nature of male bonding when Eric asks J.D. to say something about himself, and J.D. comes up with résumé boilerplate—"I set goals and I achieve them"—making it hard for Eric to connect.
It's a delicate process, and also one that traditionally excludes women. When, last season, Julie tried to make her young smarmy English teacher into a mentor, Tami almost accused him of statutory rape. You are right, Meghan, that the women are quickly domesticating the men on this show. But that dynamic is not buying them any more freedom. As principal, Tami can't find her bearings. She still seems herself only in that moment when she's in the bar with Eric, telling him he's a molder of men and how sexy she finds that. To which he responds: "I'll tell you what. I'll have to ruminate on that a bit longer, because you find it so damned sexy."
I want more for Tami, but in that moment I can't help but feel that some kind of order is restored.
A question for both of you: Are you buying Matt Saracen's mom as a character? She seems so improbable to me.
I'm on Mars with David: I think the superintendent was dead set against Tami, too. The battle over the JumboTron is a fight she shouldn't have picked—not as a new principal who clearly has no political capital, because it's a fight she couldn't win. There's a practical reason for this that in my mind blurs her moral claim here: The donors gave earmarked funds, whatever Tami's technical authority to ignore their wishes. And there's also, of course, the larger metaphorical meaning of the JumboTron: Dillon is about football first. In Friday Night Lights the book, this primacy makes itself similarly felt. The real school that's a model for Dillon High spends more on medical supplies for football players than on teaching supplies for English teachers. And the head of the English department makes two-thirds the salary of the football coach, who also gets the free use of a new car.
Hopeless as Tami's plea is, Katie coaxes her to try by instructing that "nobody likes an angry woman." It's Tami's anger that's making her fumble and bumble. That's hard for us to watch, I think, because it brings up a lot of baggage about women in authority being seen as bitches. Tami remembers Katie's words and tells the superintendent, "I'm not angry," but her voice is full of righteous indignation, so he can't hear her.
Before my inner feminist erupted, however, I reminded myself that Tami was to blame, too, for playing the politics wrong. She blew her honeymoon on a lost cause. (Here's hoping Obama doesn't make the same rookie mistake.) That's why it rings false when Eric tells her that she was right, unconvincingly contradicting himself from a couple of episodes ago.
I don't share your despair, though, because Tami is already bouncing back. She used the JumboTron announcement to do what she should have done from the get go: co-opt Buddy Garrity into raising the kind of money she needs by making him host a silent auction for the school at his car dealership. You can't beat Dillon's football fat cats if you're Tami. You have to join them.
Meanwhile, even as Eric is being valorized in this episode—that lingering shot of the "Coach Eric Taylor" sign on his door was for anyone who missed the theme—he doesn't entirely live up to his billing. Yes, he gets big points for getting Smash to college. (Since I am still caught up in the glory of last Sunday's Super Bowl—how about that game!—I'm feeling kindlier toward the idea of Smash playing college ball, though I reserve the right to come to my senses and start worrying about his brain getting battered.) But what is Eric thinking by dividing quarterback duties between Matt and J.D., and running a different offense for each? It's baby-splitting, and it bodes badly. I'm betting against the Panthers in the next game. Related point of ongoing frustration: The writers seem to have settled back into portraying J.D. as robotic and empty-headed, the boy with Xbox between his ears.
Matt, by too-obvious contrast, is ever the thoughtful, winsome struggler. You're right, Hanna, that his mother is a disappointment. I was happy to meet Shelby because she's played by one of my favorite actresses from Deadwood. But I don't believe in her character, either. Where's the sordid underbelly—the lack of caring, or mental illness, or selfishness that would help us understand why she left her child? Knowing that Matt's dad is a jerk only makes her act of abandonment less explicable. And so I'm waiting for the bitter reality check: I was ready for Shelby to start to disappoint by not showing up as promised to take Matt's grandmother to the doctor. But there she was, right on time. I don't buy the pat self-redemption, and I hope the show goes deeper and darker.
After reading your entries, Hanna and Emily, I am left with a big, unanswerable question many others have asked before: Why is this show not more popular? It's smart and sharp. Yet it's also extremely watchable. (In contrast, say, to The Wire, another critical darling that never quite made it to the big time. That show required a lot more of the viewer than Friday Night Lights does.) Over the past two seasons in particular, FNL has made an effort to reach out to both male and female viewers: It may address male honor and epitomize modern male sentimentality, as you and I have both mentioned, Hanna. But it also offers up a buffet of romantic conflict that ought to sate the appetite of the most stereotypically girly viewer. A good chunk of the show is about teenage amour, bad cafeteria food, and cute boys, for God's sake! Just see the Tyra-Cash-Landry love triangle this week.
Does the mere mention of football turn viewers away? Is the show trying to be all things to all people—and failing in the process? Or has NBC just flubbed it by scheduling it on Friday nights? I have another theory, but there's absolutely no evidence for it. Sometimes I think FNL hasn't reached a huge audience because it doesn't appeal to the ironic hipster sensibility that turns shows like Summer Heights High or Flight of the Conchords into word-of-mouth hits—it's too earnest to ignite that YouTube viral transmission. Anyway, I'm curious to know what you (and our readers) think, because in general it seems to me that good TV has a way of making itself known and getting watched.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming: Yes, Hanna, I find Matt's mom too good to be true. And the writers seem to know it, because they are hardly even trying to give her interesting lines. She's like a relentless optimist's idea of a deadbeat mom. And, Emily, I agree with you about Tami: She flubbed the JumboTron wars by choosing to wage the wrong skirmish in the larger battle. Those were earmarked funds. She's got to figure out a way to guilt the boosters into giving her money; she can't just demand it.
Meanwhile, I find myself in agreement with Mindy for once: That Cash sure is a fine lookin' cowboy. In this episode, Tyra's a kind of parallel to Tami: Both are struggling and making some bad decisions. In Tyra's case, it's ditching geeky sweetheart Landry—who clearly adores her—after his dental surgery in order to make out with Cash, a bad boy with big blue eyes and a love-me attitude. Cash doesn't wear his heart on his Western shirt sleeve as Landry does; he wears his charm, whirling into town with the rodeo and impressing the audience with his staying power in the prestigious bronc event. (Rodeo neophytes: Check out the wonderful chapter about it in Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, a stunning meditation on the West.)
Tyra falls hard for Cash's routine. "Billy never mentioned that Mindy's little sister turned into a goddess," he whispers to her at the bar. Cash is an archetype, but the writers sketch him well, refusing to let him seem too obviously dangerous. Even I fell victim to his spell, wondering fruitlessly whether—this time!—the bad boy might be tamed. If we need a warning that he won't, I think, it comes in the barbecue scene at Tyra's house. Billy Riggins—an old friend of Cash's—is recalling what a good baseball player Cash was in high school. Cash laughs it off, turns to Tyra, and, with a devil-may-care drawl, says, "Baseball's too slow and boring … right now I like to ride broncs in the rodeo. Yee-haw!" Like any good come-on line, the charge is all in the delivery, and it works on Tyra. But (just like Tami) she's misreading the politics of the situation—in this case, the sexual politics. Right?
Meanwhile, Emily, I don't think I agree that Taylor's embracing the spread offense is a form of baby-splitting. It seems pragmatic, if perhaps a little softhearted. But how can Eric not be softhearted about Matt? He is so winsome, and he's worked his ass off. The other thing is that J.D. is such a wuss, still. Part of being a quarterback, on this show, is being a leader—and how can J.D. be a leader when he's still a follower? He's not even rebellious enough to eat fried food, for Christ's sake. ("My dad won't let me," he says.) How's being Daddy's Little Boy going to inspire his teammates? J.D. may have the skills but is going to have to get some gumption before he takes this team as far as it can go.
Though, yeah, it'll probably go wrong. For the sake of drama, at least.
Curious to hear your thoughts …
Meghan
Meghan, I agree with your wild-card theory. I've always thought the show doesn't touch a nerve because it's too straightforwardly sentimental. Or, at least, it's a strange hybrid of sentimental and sophisticated. The themes are not so different from middlebrow dreck like, say, Touched by an Angel—honor, heart, the power of inspiration, staying optimistic in the face of bad odds. The show is hardly ever knowing. Hannah Montana is also a TV teenager, but she would be an alien dropped into this version of America. And when the show goes dark, it's on Oprah's themes—missing fathers, serious illness, divorce. Yet, there is something about the show that transmits "art" and makes it inaccessible. It's not tidy, for example, either in its camerawork or the way it closes its themes. It insists on complicating its heroes and villains, as we've discussed, which is why we like it.
I demurely disagree about Cash, however. He's an archetype, but one that Brokeback Mountain has ruined for me forever. To me, Cash just screams male stripper—the name alone conjures up visions of dollars tucked in briefs. I did not fail to notice that the episode pretty much ditched Tim Riggins, as if there were only room for one male hottie at a time. And I'll take the brooding drunk over the sweet-talking pill-popper any day.
On an unrelated note, anyone notice how much actual cash is floating around Dillon? Lets start a running list of the items the good citizens of a real Dillon could probably never afford. I'll start:
Hanna,
Well, if I had to choose between Tim Riggins and Cash, I'd go for the brooding drunk, too. In any case, your Brokeback Mountain reference has shamed me out of my crush. I always fall too easily for the glib talkers.
Meanwhile, though, it looks like Dillon's real-life counterpart does have a McMansion district. Welcome to the McCoy home. It even has a hobby room for his trophies.
Meghan
Smart mail from a reader named Josh about FNL's popularity, or lack thereof: He points out that the show got not a single ad spot during the Super Bowl, when NBC had a captive audience of many millions of football fans. If you're right, Meghan and Hanna, that on-screen complexity and the taking of hard lumps explain why FNL hasn't found a mass audience, then the character who is most to blame is Matt Saracen. Watching him in this last episode nearly broke my heart. The QB baby-splitting went poorly, as threatened. Dillon won the game, but barely, and when Matt walks off the field and the world around him goes silent, as if he were underwater, we know that he's done.
Coach Taylor drives to Matt's house (plenty of peeling paint here, to contrast with the McCoy mansion) on the painful errand of demoting him. Coach doesn't say much, and nothing at all of comfort: For all the ways this show adores Eric, he regularly comes up short on words and compassion at crucial moments. (Another bitter, not-for-everyone layer of complexity.) Matt doesn't say much, either. He just looks stricken. When his grandma and Shelby ask Matt whether he's OK, he tells them yes. Then we watch him stand by the door outside, 17, alone, lonely, and cut up inside. It's a scene that makes me want to wall off my own smaller boys from adolescence.
As I muttered curses at Coach Taylor, my husband reminded me that players don't have a right to their spots. J.D. has the magic arm. Matt just has heart and a work ethic. State championship or not, he's been revealed as the kid who only made QB 1 because of Jason Street's accident. Matt sees it this way himself: He tells Shelby as much in a later scene. What kills me about this narrative is that it's too harsh. Matt has been a smart, clutch quarterback. And yet his self-doubt is inevitable. By stripping Matt of his leadership role in the middle of his senior year, Coach has called into question the whole arc of Matt's rise. (Even as Coach knows as well as we do that this is a kid who's got no one to help see him through the disappointment.) Ann, I love your points about Eric and Tami over on XX Factor, but though Eric is prepared to lose the JumboTron fight, he sure isn't prepared to risk his season. Or, more accurately perhaps, the Wrath of the Boosters that would come with benching J.D., win or lose.
The big question now is whether Matt has lost his job for good or whether there's a cinematic comeback in his future. The realistic plot line would be for J.D. to succeed at QB 1—or succeed well enough to keep the job. That would make Matt's story that much more painful but also pretty singular. I am trying to think of a sports icon from movie or TV who falls and stays fallen so that the drama isn't about redemption on the field but the quotidian small moments of going on with life. The Wrestler might be such a movie, though I doubt a grown up Matt Saracen will have much in common with Randy "The Ram" Robinson. At least I hope not. A parlor game: Who are these FNL teenagers going to be when they grow up, if the show's ratings were ever to let them? Does Tim stop drinking long enough to open his own construction company? (He's got Buddy's sales line down, anyway.) Does Lyla leave Dillon for college and become a radio host? And what about Matt, whom I mostly picture as a gentle father throwing a football to his own boys?
If I'm being sentimental—and I realize I'm so absorbed by Matt's troubles that I've ignored Julie's tattoo and the four stooges' house-buying—the show this time isn't. After Eric's visit, we see Matt and Landry pulling up to school in the morning, just as they did when they were sophomore losers in the beginning of the first season. Matt looks out his window and sees J.D. Landry looks out and sees Tyra with Cash. They're back where they started two years ago.
I agree, Emily: This episode is pretty unsentimental. In fact, it's probably the best of the season so far. Partly that's because it begins with football rather than ending with it, loosening up what had come to seem like a predictable structure. One key result is that the episode can follow out plot points having to do with the team: In this case, it follows Matt's sense of failure and disappointment and Coach Taylor's need to address the fact that, as the game announcer put it, J.D. McCoy has turned out to be "the real deal." I'm always happiest when the show has more football and less necking on it.
I liked how the writers intertwined Matt's disappointment with the reappearance of Jason Street. Street is suffering from a disappointment, too, reminding us that even great quarterbacks go on to suffer. Street, of course, was paralyzed from the waist down in an accident that the first season revolved around; now he's had another accident: He got a girl pregnant in a one-night stand. He has a son. It's turning out to be the central joy of his life. And unlike so many guys his age—who'd be in college—he's facing the concrete pressures of needing to make money. You called Street and his pals the "Four Stooges," Emily, and I get why, because this episode treats them as goofballs: Riggins, Street, and Herc sit around trying to figure out how to make some bucks quick. I love the scene in which Jason is trying to think of something simple that everyone needs. ("A sharp pencil," Herc says unhelpfully.)
It's almost shticky, but what keeps it from being too much so is the quite poignant reality underlying the slacker riffing. They don't just want money; they need money. And it's not all that clear that they can get it. The scene at the bank when Street and Herc are trying to get a loan and Tim and Billy fail to show up—because they don't have the cash they promised they have—is brutal. Street uses the word dumbass to describe Billy and Tim, but that's putting it gently. You see how people with good intentions easily cross to the wrong side of the law.
Meanwhile, Matt's mom is driving me crazy, but I guess the poor guy needs something good in his life. She's eerily thoughtful just as Tami starts to flip out and become oddly uptight—coming down hard on Tyra in ways that alienate her and flipping out at her daughter, Julie, for getting a tattoo on her ankle. The writing here is excellent: I flashed back to when I got a second ear piercing without telling my mom and she flipped out. I think she said exactly what Tami did: that I'd ruined and disfigured my body. Twenty years later, I can see the scene from both mom and daughter's perspective: to Julie, who's desperately seeking autonomy, her mom's nervousness looks square and hypocritical—from her perspective, it's just a tattoo and "it doesn't mean anything." But for Tami, Julie's mini-rebellion seems as if it's part of a larger slide to … she doesn't know what, and that's precisely what's terrifying. She has to assume it does mean something. Or does she? This was a moment when I wished we could see Tami with a friend, because you kind of think the friend might give Tami a hug and say, "Your daughter's going to be OK." Because Julie is: She isn't giving off all the other signs of unhappiness that would seem to trigger real concern. She just wants to feel that she's got some control over her own life—even if she doesn't fully.
I also loved this episode, but boy, was it dark. I continue to marvel at how subtly the show ties what's happening on the field to what's happening off it. Emily, I too was struck by how Eric, for maybe the first time, consistently came up short in this episode. Usually he can pull out just the right words to smooth over a painful situation. But with Matt, as you point out, it's not working. He tries to comfort Matt, but first Mom interrupts, then Grandma interrupts. Later, in the locker room, Matt himself makes it clear he isn't having it. "Good talk, coach," he says sardonically.
In fact, the "good talk" in this episode is the one Riggins keeps delivering in a cynical salesman mode. Like a character from a George Saunders story, Riggins spews some weird sales line he picked up from Buddy, about how when the rats leave a sinking market, "the true visionaries come in." Riggins seems surprised to hear the words coming out of his mouth and even more surprised that they work. "I'm a true visionary!" Billy says and then hands over the money for the house that the Four Stooges want to flip. And, of course, we all know, although they don't, that this will lead to disaster. The boys just fight over the money and the house, and the mother of Street's child is horrified, not comforted. Plus, they'll never sell that house. It's as if when Eric chose money and success (J.D.) over heart (Matt), the consequences of that decision rippled all over town.
The whole episode had a very Paul Auster feel. One fleeting thing—an unearned pile of money, a one-night stand, a tattoo, a suddenly paralyzed teammate—can change your entire life. Accident and coincidence are more powerful than any God-driven holistic narrative. My favorite moment is when they cut from the meth dealer shooting at the Riggins truck straight to Jason babbling to his new little boy. There is no happy script. Life can be a little random and scary, and it can all turn on a dime. This is why those ominous radio announcers—"If they lose this one, they can kiss this season goodbye"—really get under your skin. One missed pass by one 17-year-old should never mean so much, but in Dillon, it does.
The episode almost felt as dark to me as the bloodiest Sopranos episode. Except for the Touched by a Mom subtheme we've all complained about. Thank God for Herc, who's man enough to handle anything. I love when he calls everyone "ladies." Also: "Babies love vaginas. It's like looking at a postcard." Who writes those great lines?
Hanna, that's such a good point about the power of random and fleeting moments to wreak havoc on this show. I think that's a theme common to many of the best HBO dramas as well. Maybe it's a life truth that a TV show is particularly well-suited to reveal. There's much more pressure on movies, with their two-hour arcs, to depict larger-than-life incidents and tell a story as if it's complete and whole. And often that constraint gives short shrift to the power of the random and to the frayed threads that make up so much of lived experience.
But I don't really buy your idea that on FNL the central conflict between good and evil is also between heart vs. money. That seems too simple. J.D. isn't a potentially brilliant quarterback because he's rich. Yes, his parents paid for extra coaching, but mostly, J.D. has God-given talent. Smash's similar talent comes with working-class roots, and it looks like he's on his way to success, and we're meant to celebrate that. Money is a source of corruption—Tim and Billy's copper wire theft—but it's also the vehicle for redemption—Jason's attempt to channel those ill-gotten gains into his house-buying scheme. If he fails, I don't think it will be because the show treats money as inherently corrupt. It'll be because money is painfully out of reach. And money vs. heart leaves out other deep currents on FNL—like athletic prowess and also the religious belief represented by all those pregame prayer circles.
A couple of observations from readers before I sign off. My friend Ruben Castaneda points out that for all its subtle treatment of black-white race relations, FNL has had only a few, not wholly developed, Hispanic characters. That's especially too bad for a show about Texas. From reader Greg Mays, one more thought about why Tami has no girlfriends. He writes, "As the husband of a coach's wife, I have a theory: It's tough to have any real friends in the school-student circle as the coach's wife because you have to be watchful of their intentions to influence your husband. … Also, if my wife is representative, there is a population of coaches' wives who are coaches' wives because they are more likely to have male friends than female." I'm not sure that last part describes Tami, but I could imagine it does other Mrs. Coaches.
And hey, Meghan, I have the same double pierce story, from seventh grade. My parents drew a straight line: earring to mohawk to drugs to jail. They didn't come to their senses as quickly as Tami, either.
FNL has always operated on the opposite principle of most teenage shows. It's about teenagers, but it isn't actually written for them, which might explain why it's not more popular, as fellow fan and writer Ruth Samuelson pointed out to me. Take the role of parents, for example. In most American shows about teenagers, the parents are not really relevant. They might leave a ham sandwich on the table or some milk in the fridge, but basically, their role is to let the kids wallow in their own histrionics. But in FNL, the parents drive all the action. When they are absent, they are really absent, as in gone off to war, or deadbeat, turning their kids into old souls who have to endure alone.
Finally, in Episode 6, we get a break from all that. This one is all about teenagers letting go, which results in some fine OC-style interludes. Riggins cruises around town in a Dazed and Confused mode, showing J.D. all the hot spots in Dillon where he can get laid. J.D. gets drunk, and Julie and Matt go to the lake—all the way to the lake, if you know what I mean. "This is the first Saturday I can wake up not having to think about everything I did wrong," he says. Then, after some splashing and rolling around, Julie gets home after the newspaper boy has already made his rounds and sneaks in the door. We're bracing for Tami to march out of her bedroom screaming and yelling and waving a jilbab in her daughter's face, but nothing like that happens. Tami does not even stir in her bed, for all we know. The tattoo caused an uproar, but the virginity left in peace.
Let's just linger here some more since Emily, you particularly have worried so much about Matt Saracen. Matty shows up at Julie's house in Landry's car. He and Julie share the best awkward TV teenage kiss I've ever seen, followed by a most convincing stretch of post-coital bliss, which carries through to Sunday morning church. And Matt's improbable mother is nowhere to be seen. For one dreamy weekend, being orphaned and benched has its benefits.
The ur-parent of the show, meanwhile, goes off the deep end. First, J.D.'s dad whisks his son out of the locker room after a victory to go celebrate with mom at Applebee's instead of letting him celebrate with the team. Then, after J.D. gets drunk, his dad forces him to apologize to Coach Taylor in church for disappointing the coach and the team. He is proving himself to be the stage parent from hell and making the option of having no dad at all look better and better.
The show has always been thoughtful on the subject of parenting, contrasting the coach's tight family with the lost orphans of Dillon. The addition of the McCoys complicates things, since they make concerned parents look like nightmares. And here, we get the final twist, where the Dillon orphans get to shine.
Actually, the final twist comes with the very sweet scene where Jason Street sings "Hole in My Bucket" over the phone to his son, who is at that very moment driving away from him. This is imperfect, patch-it-together parenting (like the song says). And it's not really working, but it might someday. (Pay attention, Bristol Palin.)
So, speaking of imperfect, is that kid Cash's son or not?
Yes, the kids took over the show this week, and what did we get? Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
Sex. I also loved the Julie and Matt kiss and actually the whole thing: the unceremonious, post-hotdogs roll by the campfire and the blissful aftermath. For one thing, Matt deserves a weekend of sweetness. For another, I'm happy to see teenage sex as neither airbrushed and eroticized nor an emotional crack-up. Sometimes, 16- and 17- year-olds just lovingly sleep together. Maybe Tami didn't wake up and freak out because she doesn't have to. Though she did pick up on the shy, pleased Sunday-morning glances that Julie and Matt exchanged in church, which signaled to me what you suggested, too: Dream weekends don't last.
Drugs. Can I stick up for J.D.'s dad for a minute without sending myself to Dillon detention? He is indeed the smarmy, overbearing stage dad, so caricatured I can barely watch him. But if Tim Riggins wanted to take my ninth-grader out to get drunk and who knows what else, I might cart him home, too. It's all well and good for Coach Taylor to encourage Riggins to mentor J.D. To loosen this kid up, Eric is willing to keep quiet about J.D.'s naked mile sprint and whatever hijinks Riggins comes up with, it seems. I'm not sure I can blame Annoying Applebee's McCoy for resisting. If acceptance on the football team means getting shitfaced at age 14, then maybe that's a reason unto itself that a freshman shouldn't be quarterback. Best part of the J.D. party scene, however: Lyla as Tim's long-suffering sidekick, shouldering J.D.'s weight so she can help drag him out of harm's way.
Rock 'n' roll: Landry and his band light up the garage. Or rather, they fail to light it up, in spite of their acned-splendor, until Devin, the cute freshman, comes along. She's got the guitar skills, the green cardigan, the sneakers, and the pink lip gloss. And she's got Landry's number. She tells him all his songs are about the same thing, the same girl. It's time to get over that Tyra, for the sake of the music. Hanna, what do you make of it that in this teen-driven episode, the character keenly passing judgment is the ninth-grade upstart?
You asked, meanwhile, about Cash and his baby mama and their sad toddler. Yep, that's his kid (don't you think?), and Tyra is demonstrating a willful detachment from reality by believing otherwise. I'm sorry Meghan is out this week (don't worry, readers; she'll be back next week), because you are both more interested in Cash than I am. I just can't get past how much he looks like Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy. And besides, don't we know how this story comes out? Won't Tyra fall out of this relationship bruised, callused, and less likely to make it to college? The only glimmer of brain activity I saw in this plotline was the moment in which Julie made fun of her, and Tyra remembered that was the kind of joke that Landry used to make. Ditch the lying cowboy already.
The contrast to Cash comes when Jason sings to his baby, in that scene you've already mentioned. I loved the cuts to Herc and Billy and Tim while Jason cooed. It reminded me of a point Meghan made a few weeks ago about FNL's distinctive brand of male sentimentality. There's Jason, putting himself on the line for his kid even as that child moves farther from him, mile after mile. Jason is the show's tragedy. Can he also somehow pull off its redemption? Or would that be unworthy of this show?
This is an argument we have in my household all the time and which will come to full boil when our children are teenagers. I would rather raise a kid like Riggins than one like J.D. In my book, parental oppression is a crime, not quite on order with negligence—but still. (My mother calls me like five times a day, just to give you the source.) As I was relishing the awkward teenage sex scene between Matt and Julie, which we've discussed, David (my husband) was having a very overprotective paternal reaction: His view is that Matt slept with Julie to get back at Coach. Coach took away what mattered most to Matt, so Matt got his revenge by doing the same. I think this is crazy dad talk—teens in love don't need any extra motive to have sex, especially not on a sunny day by the lake—but it gives you a window into our differences.
As for Devin, what an excellent point. I hadn't quite noticed that Devin had become Tami in miniature, dispensing wise looks from behind her hipster glasses. Like any city girl, I have a soft spot for these cute misfit girls with a heart of gold (we just watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist last night—Norah is one, too). But I do have one complaint. Every few episodes, the show introduces a character who looks like she strolled straight out of a walk-up in Park Slope, Brooklyn (the Riggins' old neighbor, Landry's last girlfriend). I know, I know, Texas is cooler than I think. But can't we aim for a little authenticity?
But, Hanna, you're defending Riggins' leading of J.D. down the drinking path by talking about Matt and Julie sleeping together. With the emphasis on together, because it all looked completely mutual to me. (If David really thinks otherwise, then I hear you about your upcoming battles; maybe my husband didn't have that crazy dad moment because we don't have girls.) But my main point is that sex and drugs are different. For teenagers as well as for adults. I mean, I love Riggins, and I'd pick him over J.D., too. But then I'd work on his six-pack habit, which looks like a symptom of loneliness and depression most of the time. Whereas Matt and Julie—that looks like a good thing in need only of the intervention of a condom.
One more point: Last week, I wrote about a reader's frustration with the show's lack of Hispanic characters. Reader Sean Mabey points out another lapse: "During the first season, Smash's friends were exclusively black and he was at odds (to put it nicely) with Riggins. Fast forward two years, and you don't see Smash in the company of another black guy for the entire third season and who's in the car with him on the way to A&M? Riggins." Hmm.
You're right to distinguish between Julie and Matt's roll in the hay and Riggins' drinking. But let's forget about his bad habit for a moment and concentrate on what he was trying to accomplish that night with J.D. The way J.D. and his dad are operating, J.D. is a menace to the team. His dad is in it only for his son and does not want him to be contaminated by the rest of them. This is ugly, mercenary behavior and the worst of football. It's the opposite of what Coach Taylor wants for the team. So Riggins was subverting Mr. McCoy's influence in the only way he knows how. And there's precedent in Riggins' humanitarian party missions—remember the time he saved Julie from that skeazy guy at a party? Once again, Riggins is sacrificing himself for someone else's sake and getting no credit.
As for Smash and Riggins—you are absolutely right. This is more proof of the point Meghan has made. Riggins used to have a dangerous, almost racist edge. Now he's gone soft, as have all the boys on the show. Matty kicking those boxes is the most male aggression we've gotten this season.
Allow me a brief rebuttal to my beloved wife's post about Matt and Julie's trip to the lake. Hanna wrote of me: "His view is that Matt slept with Julie to get back at Coach."
Uh, no. A few nights ago when we were discussing the episode, I said, in the spirit of marital helpfulness: "Hey, Hanna, don't you think that one possible interpretation of that scene is that subconsciously, Matt sleeps with Julie in order to take the thing most precious to Coach Taylor, his daughter's virginity, because Coach Taylor has taken a thing precious to him, the job as QB1?"
Note: I did not say that that was what I believed, because I don't believe it. I happen to think the lake tryst was lovely. It didn't set any of my paternal protectiveness neurons ablaze. That revenge scenario was merely speculative and playful. I thought Hanna might throw it out there to enliven the dialogue. Instead, she exploited it to slander me, her innocent husband.
And while I'm fixating on that paragraph, Hanna, please tell me you were kidding when you wrote: "I would rather raise a kid like Riggins than one like J.D."
I have tons to say about this rich and textured episode—how could you not be moved by Landry baring his soul to Tami after Devin tells him his kiss just proved to her she's a lesbian? ("I seem to have some kind of repellent," he stutters.) Or by the Four Stooges' ongoing adventures—and misadventures—in house flipping?
But first I want to pose a question one of my friends asked about J.D.: Is FNL setting him up to be a future Todd Marinovich? Marinovich, as football fans will remember, was a vaunted quarterback who was micromanaged by his dad from birth. Like Joe McCoy, Marv Marinovich scheduled his son's every minute and meal. "I had a captive audience. … I told him when to eat, what to eat, when to go to bed, when to get up, when to work out, how to work out," Marv told Sports Illustrated. Here's a passage from an earlier SI piece about Todd:
He has never eaten a Big Mac or an Oreo or a Ding Dong. When he went to birthday parties as a kid, he would take his own cake and ice cream to avoid sugar and refined white flour. He would eat homemade catsup, prepared with honey. He did consume beef but not the kind injected with hormones. He ate only unprocessed dairy products. He teethed on frozen kidney. When Todd was one month old, Marv was already working on his son's physical conditioning. He stretched his hamstrings. Pushups were next. Marv invented a game in which Todd would try to lift a medicine ball onto a kitchen counter. Marv also put him on a balance beam. Both activities grew easier when Todd learned to walk. There was a football in Todd's crib from day one. "Not a real NFL ball," says Marv. "That would be sick; it was a stuffed ball."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Marinovich started to fall apart when he got to college—and out of reach of his father. His performance was inconsistent. Eventually he was arrested for cocaine possession. He left USC for the NFL but didn't make good there, either. He ended up in all sorts of legal trouble. In one detail that strikes me as particularly sad, he was arrested for suspected possession of drug paraphernalia, after trying to make his escape on a kid's bike, and told the police that his occupation was "anarchist."
And who wouldn't be one, if your dad had been flexing your hamstrings in the cradle? (Being called five times a day suddenly may not look so bad, Hanna.) Is this where we're supposed to think J.D. is headed?
Because, certainly, he's being squashed under his father's thumb—or fist. If Joe began to lose it in the last episode—and I can't agree, Emily, that hauling his son out the way he did is good parenting; kids fuck up, especially kids under as much pressure as J.D.—then he really lost it in this episode. Early on, Joe pulls J.D. off the practice field to yell at him, causing Coach Taylor to intercede and ask him to leave J.D. alone. And then during that week's game, Joe gets worked up as J.D. throws some incompletes and at halftime flips out at his son. Taylor intercedes again, telling Joe, "You yelling at him is not going to help. … Give him some breathing room." Then Taylor tries to perk J.D. up with some well-meaning exposition about how his own dad used to expect a lot from him on the field. It doesn't work. J.D. has Stockholm syndrome. He looks blankly at Taylor and says: "My dad—he just wants me to do my best. He just wants me to succeed is all."
This is another way football can hurt—not through concussions but through repercussions: the repercussions that come when a parent can't see how his ambitions are warping his child's own sense of adventure and risk. I feel for J.D. And I feel for Taylor, who hasn't figured how to handle this situation—and whose professional life may be threatened if he speaks honestly. Joe has the power of money and influence behind him.
Meanwhile, I wanted to talk about Buddy and his brood; their aborted road trip was perfectly pitched. Buddy is annoying in all the recognizable ways an affectionate but clueless dad can be ("You look like a hippie!" he says to Tabitha in the airport), and the kids are annoying in all the ways that clueless kids can be, whining and kvetching at all moments. And: Street is heading to New York; Riggins is applying to college—what do you make of all this change in Dillon?
(P.S.: I totally cried when Riggins was watching Coach Taylor and Billy describe his toughness and fortitude. Talk about male sentimentality.)
Teethed on frozen kidney? Wow, that is stunning, and it makes my hair stand on end. In my friend Margaret Talbot's great story about prodigy athletes, she concludes it's mostly cold corporate sponsors piling on the pressure. And one imagines the old Soviet Olympic mill (and now the Chinese one) would eat kids alive. But there's a particular pathos when it's the parents doing the pushing. The stories about those young Chinese gymnasts who didn't make the cut were heartbreaking. But at least they had parents to go home to. In J.D.'s case, the parental love is entirely contingent on his performance, or at least he perceives it that way. "He's not mad at me?" J.D. anxiously asks his mother, because her smiling face is no comfort if he can't answer that question.
One reader suggested that Riggins may be jealous of J.D.'s relationship with his dad. And there may be a hint of that in his disdain. But it's hard for me to imagine. In answer to my husband's question of last week: Yes, I would absolutely rather raise a son like Riggins than one like J.D. It's just too painful to watch that empty performance machine of a boy, one who's afraid of his own shadow. And as Meghan points out, those boys with no center spin out of control eventually. David, remember who else in our life used to endlessly ask a version of that question: "Are you mad at me?" (Answer: Stephen Glass.)
So, yes, football can destroy men. But this episode also ran in the opposite direction, reminding us of the many ways in which football can make heroes of losers. Fullback Jamarcus never told his parents he plays football, because he knows they won't let him. Then he gets into trouble at school and, in speaking to his parents, Tami lets it slip. Until this point Tami has been telling Coach to butt out, this is the principal's prerogative. But finally she realizes how her husband can impose the discipline better in this case. She explains to Jamarcus' parents how she's seen her husband "empower" and "inspire" boys through football. And also how her husband will make Jamarcus "regret the day" he ever set another kid's hair on fire or misbehaved in school. The parents had been thinking of football as a frivolous distraction, and Tami successfully reframes it as Jamarcus' salvation.
Then there's the moving scene with Riggins that you mentioned, Meghan. Riggins' life, which always seems so chaotic, turns into one of those Olympic athlete fables on screen. Billy is so articulate in praising his brother, and Coach uses that word I love hearing him say—"fortitude." We are reminded that football can make these boys into their best selves. In Riggins' case, it's his ticket out, but not in a crass way. He's using it reluctantly, so he won't get burned the way Smash did. Football even works magic on those bratty Garrity kids, who finally get into the game and stop torturing Buddy.
As for everyone leaving Dillon: They make it seem so far away and impossible. Street is going to New York? Why not stop in Austin first, just to acclimate? And then Landry, who's going to that mythical college where all the hottest co-eds fall for nerds. It's so dreamy, it just perpetuates the sense that life after the Dillon Panthers is a fantasy.
Except for Devin. Boy, do I love that girl. "She uses V-a-a-a-a-seline." That's a great song she steals, and it's nice to hear a girl sing it. And I love the way she delivers those platitudes—"Tomorrow's a brand new day"— in that flat nasal voice of hers. I'd follow her out of Dillon.
Well, you have together so thoroughly thumped J.D.'s dad that there's not much left for me to lay into. He is written to be indefensible, and you're right that there are real sports dads who spin completely out of control and damage their kids. (They don't restrict themselves to sons who play football, either: In women's tennis, there's the unforgettable father of Jennifer Capriati.) Nobody sympathizes with these people because they are parental wrecking balls.
I will say, though, that I think child prodigies pose a real dilemma for families, one that I'm glad to be spared. When kids have outsize, amazing talent, parents can nurture it and deprive them of being normal, or they can shrug it off and leave their children's potential untapped. Mr. McCoy is clearly mixing up nurture with self-deluded suffocation. Still, I read J.D.'s line about how his dad just wants him to do his best a little differently than you did, Meghan. On some level, J.D. is right—his father does want him to succeed. It's just that he wants it in a way that's utterly self-serving. I wish the character had some hint of subtlety so we could do more than just whack him. And J.D. still just seems like a blank.
Meghan, I'm glad you brought up Buddy and that sad little divorced-dad road trip. Here's a dad who over three seasons has gone from buffoon to repentant loser to make-amends struggler. The moment in which he lashes out at his kids and then flees weeping down the road should melt the heart of even a bitterly divorced mom, I would think.
But I had mixed feelings about the scene between Buddy and Lyla that follows. It was written to be touching. She says, "Dad, you've still got me," and he tells her that means a lot. But what's up with how Lyla is all blush and no bite this season? She patiently helps Riggins with the once-and-nevermore drunken J.D. She nobly stands by her father while her siblings refuse to forgive his previous sins. And then at the end of this episode, there's that close-up, wide-eyed scene between her and Jason, in which she selflessly tells him how great he'll do as a sports agent in New York as their knees touch and they sway together in the night.
I was taken with that shot for what it says about the capacity of post-breakup friendship. In fact, one by one, I went for each of these scenes of stalwart, good-girl Lyla. But rolled together, they made me miss her sharp, smart, and smug side. I wonder, too, about turning this strong and flawed female character into the beloved helpmate of every man in her life. When was the last time we heard about Lyla's college plans? Is the turn her role has taken part of the rose-colored softening Meghan has legitimately complained of—FNL maybe anticipating its own sunset by rubbing out its mean streak? I dunno. But I sure am grateful for Devin and her not-melodic Vaseline lyrics. (Though I have a reality-check quibble like the one you raised, Hanna: Would a 14-year-old in small-town Texas really come out as a lesbian without missing a garage-band beat?)
Emily, you're totally right that Joe McCoy wants "the best" for his boy in a ham-fisted way. Check. The problem is that he is convinced he knows best—and we all know what happens when father knows best: Children rebel.
Meanwhile, Lyla. I haven't until now minded Lyla's good-girl shtick—in part because she and Tim have had their flare-ups. She seems to be in one of those calm phases teenagers do sometimes go through. She's got a boyfriend. She's waiting to find out about college. (Or is she in? I can't remember. I guess that's a bad sign.) She does seem to have no real female friends—which reminds me of the apt point you made about the relative friendlessness of her adult counterpart, Tami. And it reminds me, too, of how much sharper the bite of this show was early on: Remember when all the girls in school were mean to Lyla because she was sleeping with Riggins after Street's injury? But when you think about it, back then, Lyla was striving even harder to be a helpmeet. She was saccharine in her desire for things to be "all right" after Street's injury; I think back to all those heartbreaking scenes in the hospital where she was coaxing him to be chipper about the future, and his surly face showed us that he knew the future she imagined would never come.
But that's exactly why the scene between her and Street, sitting together in the twilight, touched me. It did have that post-breakup sense of loss—the loss that accompanies getting used to things, accommodation, and plain old growing up. Just a few short years ago, they couldn't even look at each other: Street was so mad at her, and Lyla was so disappointed that her fantasy of their life together had fallen apart.
It would be kind of funny if now she ditched Riggins to sleep with J.D. Somehow, I doubt that's going to happen.
And, yes, Emily, I did wonder if Devin would feel comfortable coming out to Landry. Then again, she referred to it as her "secret." So I assume it was Landry's goofy, sincere openness that made her feel safe.
The can't-miss theme this week is the journey. Jason and Tim hit Manhattan. Tyra takes off for the rodeo circuit with Cash. Tami journeys to a new house, at least in her imagination. The bundling works, I think. The contrast between Tim as loving sidekick and Cash as casual no-goodnik points up the worth of each relationship. The line that captures the bond between Jason and Tim: "Texas forever." I knew it was coming, and I wanted to hear it, anyway. Less welcome is "He's a cowboy," which Tyra's mom says to send her off with Cash, when really it's the reason she shouldn't leave her college interviews behind. What kind of boyfriend talks you into going away with him by saying he'll try to be faithful?
A second, underlying theme this week is about making the big pitch. Tami (egged on, of course, by Katie McCoy) tries to sell a new, grand house to Eric. Matt tries to convince Coach to let him play wide receiver, with Julie's help making the case. These bids build to Jason, who pulls off the sale of his young lifetime. Actually, it's Tim's idea to persuade Jason's former teammate to sign with the sports agent Jason hopes to work for. Since the guy has just summarily dismissed the boys from his office, Tim's plan is a display of the fortitude Eric praised on the football field, translated to the world of business. Maybe this kid will make it in college.
When Jason wins the job and then shows up at Erin's door and asks, before anything else, to hold his baby—well, it sounds soapy as I write it out, but in the moment, it felt to me wholly earned. We've seen Jason as savvy salesman before, on Buddy's car lot and in the house-flipping deal. Now he's performing in a bigger venue with the same blend of naivete and determination. I appreciated the acting—the set of Jason's chin, the veins in his forehead and neck. I also liked the way the script deals with his paralysis. We've grown accustomed to the shots of Jason sitting when everyone around him is standing. In this episode, we see a shot of Tim helping Jason out of the car into his wheelchair, and the camera lingers on his dangling legs, just long enough. It drives home Jason's own analysis, in a bad moment on the New York sidewalk, of the pity his wheelchair evokes. What did you guys make of the New York visit? Is it one of the more ingenious moves of the season, or am I falling for melodrama?
I was also taken with Tami and Eric and their house-buying tempest. It seemed prescient, even, as recession fear deepens around us. Tami wants a nicer, bigger house for all the natural reasons. She keeps pointing to the backyard that Gracie Bell would have to play in. Since yards have factored heavily into every home-buying or rental decision my husband and I have made since our kids were toddlers, I sympathized.
But I sympathized more with Eric when he told his wife that much as he would love to give her and their kids and himself this house, they can't have it. Maybe the mortgage is straight-up too high—it's not entirely clear. Instead, what's unmistakable is the anxiety Eric knows he would feel by making a purchase that would give his family no financial wiggle room. We see his internal conflict, and it's laced with gender politics. Eric frames the decision in terms of what he can and can't give Tami, even though she's working now, too. He clearly wants to be a husband who can fulfill his wife's material desires. At the same time, he calls her back to what really matters to their family. They are together, whether they live in a three-bedroom split-level or have a kitchen with granite countertops and a stone fireplace. "I don't need this house," Tami tells him, like a woman sprung from a trance. They take each other's hands and dance away from the real estate agents, like escapees. I see the father-knows-best aspect of their marriage. But as ever, I care so much more about the spark (after all those years!) and their evanescent, playful spirit. They're a walking rejoinder to the excesses of feminist dogma.
Cash and Tyra, on the other hand, are a reminder of the continuing relevance of that old story: the girl who is reaching higher, only to be yanked back to earth by her cowboy man.
Emily, the current I saw running though all the plot twists you describe is the different ways men and women make decisions. In this episode, the two key women—Tami and Tyra—are focused on relationships, pursuing conversation and connection above all else. Meanwhile, the men—Jason, Matt, Eric—go for hard results. In the end, the women don't exactly get what they want, while the men do.
Tami keeps pestering Eric to have a "conversation" with her about the house. "We are having a conversation!" Eric answers. By which he means she asked and he told her "No!" But she keeps it up, waking him in the middle of the night. "OK, can I turn the light off?" My favorite moment is when they are all sitting around the dinner table with Matt. Julie is haranguing Eric about making Matt wide receiver. Tami is haranguing him about the house. Finally, he gets sick of it. "All right, let's go," he says to Matt, who has just proposed they run 10 plays outside to test him. If he gets them all, Eric has to think about making him wide receiver. The boys skip out of all the talk and solve their problems with cold, hard stats and football.
Now, you can reasonably argue that Eric was right about that house. Maybe they couldn't afford it. But the point is how quickly Tami caved during the second visit. She blinked once then said, "I don't need this house" and declared her life full enough with Jules and Gracie Bell and her husband. It's as if all along, all she wanted was for Eric to hear her out and walk through the process with her, and that was all.
Meghan, you've outlined this dynamic before: A man is having a hard time, and then one of the show's tough women describes how much it means that he is taking care of her. The result is that she creates a safe space for his emotions—the "show's distinctive brand of male sentimentality," you called it. A version of that happens here. Tami is suddenly called back to her responsibility as wife and mother, and that soothes her, and him. In Tami's case, she doesn't sacrifice much. She still does have a great family and a pretty decent house. But Tyra is doing the same thing, no? She, too, is opting to take care of Cash, who has convinced her what a tough time he has alone on the road. But in her case it's fatal. Maybe Tami was telling Tyra one lesson but showing her another. This is why the validating of the wifely duties on FNL always grates on me.
Now as for male sentimentality, this episode wins the prize.
Here we have the mother of all crying scenes. Tim Riggins' lovable mug, usually adored by the camera, is in this episode contorted into a blotchy mess as he watches his friend finally get his lady. He is sad and happy all at once, but mostly he is mush. Yet his male sentimentality is acceptable because he has, throughout the episode, acted in a manly, honorable way. Tim is what you want in a wife. He doesn't wake up Jason in the middle of the night. He doesn't want conversation; in fact, he mostly speaks in three-word sentences. But what he does do is deliver concrete solutions: Go to Paul Stuart. Leave Paul Stuart. Buy two suits, two shirts, two ties. Get Wendell to sign with the agent. Now go get your girl. And, unlike Tyra, Jason doesn't have to choose between the girl and his future; he gets them both.
As for whether I liked the New York diversion: It's always good when characters get pushed into a new location. The famous Sopranos Pine Barren episode, when Christopher and Paulie go to the woods to kill the Russian, set the bar really high on this kind of plot twist. The New York diversion wasn't that good, but it did take on the question of Life after Dillon. And at least they didn't just drop Street.
It's funny, I'm less bothered by the "father knows best" (as Emily aptly put it) aspect of Eric and Tami's marriage than either of you. Hanna, you say that the quickness with which Tami caved to Eric grated on you. You connected it to Tyra's wishy-washiness. And I take the point, but I read this scene differently: The episode, I thought, was trying to draw a distinction between Tami's compromise and Tyra's. After all, a feminist marriage/partnership isn't one in which the woman gets her own way all the time or even digs in her heels to make a point. It's one where you learn to hear when your partner is giving you good advice—acting as a counterweight. And Tami was getting overexcited about something impractical. This is what's so hard about relationships: learning when a "we" is more important than an "I."
In this case, there was no way Eric could feel like part of the "we" if they bought the house, because, as he sees it, he has almost no job security. At the same time, though, he doesn't handle it well at first, going rigid instead of just trying to talk to Tami. I actually like this scene, because Tami got what she really wanted: Eric's attention, his willingness to enter the fantasy with her for a second, his ability to make her feel it is a partnership even when he can't give her what she really wants. If she says she doesn't "need" the house to make him feel better—well, that's part of what keeps their spark alive, isn't it? And he does it too, at least a bit.
Meanwhile, on the N.Y.-Texas front—the Riggins/Street trip to the Big Apple has a gimmicky feel, but the show pulls it off. The sequence about trying to buy a suit at Paul Stuart illustrates so much about how easy it is to feel like a pie-eyed outsider in moneyed New York. I remember feeling similarly as a teenager sometimes, even though I grew up in Brooklyn. My parents were teachers, and I went to few fancy stores until I was an adult; sometimes I still get nervous in them, and I love how the show brought that feeling to the fore.
"Why would you want to leave Texas?" Riggins asks Street in disbelief after Jason reveals his grand plan to head to the Big Apple. It's a measure of the show's success that the statement can be taken at face value (who would want to leave this place with its deep comradeship and warm football-filled nights?) and heard from an ironic distance (who wouldn't want to leave this place, with its flat landscape and its sense of being isolated from larger opportunities?).
Tyra is in danger of falling subject to that isolation. I think the writers are going to save her in the end, but it would be Wire-like of them to sacrifice her to apathy and lassitude; if this were The Wire, we'd see her three seasons from now dancing at the Landing Strip, unable to excavate herself from the world where she grew up, despite her smarts and her desires.
Ugh, how annoying Joe McCoy is! He defines smarmy and pushy. Most Joes come in a less obvious form, but from now on I'm going to be playing a parlor game with my acquaintances and colleagues. Which ones are Erics, and which ones are Joes? Eric, after all, is the model of cooperation underneath all that brusqueness. Joe, by contrast, epitomizes self-serving deafness to the needs of others.
Meanwhile, anyone notice how tall all the women on this show are?
Hanna, yes, Tim is like a wife, but of the rare sort who knows when it's time to be an ex-wife. Like Lyla in the previous episode, he is helping Jason by letting him go. His mush face is what it feels like to watch an old, irreplaceable friend walk away from you. For the first time, the show is recognizing that these teenagers have to grow up. Meghan, I can totally see Tyra gone bad at 20, swinging around a Landing Strip pole. When I was ruing her decision to ditch school, my husband pointed out that what the show got right was why. In her FNL world, it's a choice that makes sense. Tyra's mom is the ultimate underminer: She is constantly upping the man-pressure and tearing down college. Tami is there for Tyra, but in this episode, she was a realist about the results of that college interview at a moment when Tyra needed a cheerleader. Then there was the interview itself. Am I being an adult scold here, or did Tyra blow it the minute she kept the college counselor waiting by saying she had to take a call on her cell phone (from Cash, natch)? Big forces, little choices—they add up to more than Tyra can push up the hill.
Meanwhile, Julie. A friend of mine has been ranting that she's a "whiny self-indulgent twit." Hanna, you make her part of your girl-talky-talk trope for telling Eric to let Matt try wide receiver. But I like Julie this season. In that dinner-table scene, I thought she pulled off assertive rather than whiny or petulant. Plus, she's right. Eric's brusqueness was too brusque. He needed his women to reel him back from the brink of unreasonable. OK, maybe the male-female power dynamic wasn't quite even-steven this episode. But if you take Tyra out of the picture for a sec, it's close.
There is rock bottom, and then there is drunk and half-naked on the couch with only the cardboard beer fraulein as his companion. Yes, Mindy dumped him, so Billy was forced to fold beer lady in half and seat her at the coffee table, no doubt having poured out his heart to her before he fell asleep. This episode features a few such postcards from the underside. The saddest is Tyra as Lolita, trapped in the Tropicana Motel in Dallas, sitting poolside in the rain, trying not to cry on the phone with Landry.
Back at Dillon High, Buddy has announced some good news: a national TV network (NBC—ha!) has chosen to broadcast the game on Friday night. The development allows for some nice comparisons between life on TV and life lived in Dillon. The TV type who shows up at Dillon High has slicked-back hair and speaks in a sportscaster patter, even when the cameras are turned off. Meanwhile, Lorraine Saracen's house is looking especially like the set of a Horton Foote play. Matt falls asleep on the couch watching a cooking show that could not possibly be aired in the year 2009. The screen shot shows some flat dull brownies baked in the kind of dented pan I sometimes borrow from my mother-in-law. The camera lingers on the tinfoil holding together the antennae on Lorraine's wood-paneled TV.
We've discussed before how the show intentionally locks Dillon out of pop culture or any TV references. This episode plays that up. Coach is annoyed the network is showing up, because he knows it will make the fans act like baboons and his players lose focus. Of course, they pull through in the end, only because of the commitment and fortitude of the honorable Matt Saracen.
The life in Dillon/life on TV contrast reminded me of a point Susan Faludi makes in Stiffed, her 1999 book about American manhood. The men of the World War II generation were raised in what she calls the "Ernie Pyle ideal of heroically selfless manhood." They were taught to be brave and heroic and take one for the team. But for various reasons, they failed to pass these lessons on to their baby boomer sons. Instead they got their models from "ornamental culture"—TV, movies, and celebrity culture, which peddle a primping cartoon of manhood, unmoored from the old patriarchy.
In this episode, the Dillon Panthers and especially Matt represent the prelapsarian age, when men knew how to be men. Matt, who knows how to sacrifice, takes hit after hit, and it pays off. Those TV trucks parked outside the school and the slick newscaster represent the world outside, where everyone just wants to be famous. Eric sees them, and he rolls his eyes.
Overall, this episode was a little soap operatic and heavy on relationship drama (Tyra and Cash, Billy and Mindy, Lyla and Tim). But what saves it, as always, are the small moments—Tyra walking out the back door of that saloon, Mindy teaching Lyla how to dance. In an interview with the AV Club, Taylor Kitsch, who plays Riggins, talks about how much the actors improvise. This gives a certain spontaneity to the show, so that even when the soap plot veers into its happy ending, the show can breathe.
Buddy hears the knock at the door: "Let's see. It's not your mother, and I don't have any friends," he says to a hidden Lyla. "I bet I know." Then Riggins apologizes to Lyla, sweetly, wholeheartedly, four times (most women would have buckled after three). Whether or not these particular lines were improvised I have no idea. But they pass in such a funny, lighthearted way that we let Tim's dubious redemption slide.
The one character I'm having increasing trouble with is Lorraine. What are we supposed to make of her? Is she selfish? Manipulative like Tony Soprano's mom? Really losing it?
Hanna and Meghan,
The problem with Lorraine Saracen is that she moves in and out of her dementia expertly. Alzheimer's does cloud the brain at some times and not others, but not on a schedule that dovetails with a TV show plot. I believe Lorraine's anger and discomfort with Shelby. Paranoia and fear of a particular person—in my experience, especially an unfamiliar caregiver—often accompany the disease.
But I didn't believe in Grandma's utter lack of sympathy this week with Matt's bid to go to college. That's a trump card when played against any grandparent who is in her right mind and most who are not. A grandmother might manipulate her way into persuading her grandchild to stick around, but Lorraine goes right at him. I guess the show gets points, in an after-school-special sort of way, for dramatizing the plight of a teenager whose future is constrained by his family responsibilities. But Lorraine is being written too as selfish and Shelby too virtuous. I had the same thought about Mickey Rourke's character when I saw The Wrestler. When deadbeat parents are portrayed as only kind and decent, if bumbling, one wonders about how they managed to walk away from their kids in the past. I know, I know, people change. But do they really go from abandonment to being entirely upstanding and reliable? Rourke, at least, fails his daughter once in the movie; Shelby, so far, is all saccharine concern for Matt.
Meanwhile, this episode is a meditation on the loser boyfriend, in sizes small, medium, and large. Riggins, of course, is the minor, forgivable version. His transgressions are really only against himself, and then he still offers Lyla his Apology in Four Movements. Riggins' trajectory on this show can be measured in the distance he has traveled since the last time Lyla kicked him out of her car. (Remember, first-season loyalists? Hint: His devotion to Jason wasn't foremost in his mind.)
The midsize loser boyfriend is Billy. He peels himself off the couch, blotchy and blurry-eyed, and raps on Mindy's window to tell her that she can go back to work at the Landing Strip, no questions asked. Is her fight for the right to pole dance a victory for womanhood? Well, yes, maybe it is. Mindy won't be one of those wives who takes the off-ramp out of her career and into dependency on a man who can't stay employed. She'll get to dance into her dotage. Hmm, now I am back to The Wrestler, and Marisa Tomei trying to sell a lap dance to a bunch of barely of-age boys. Clearly, I need to see more movies.
Cash, of course, is the rotten louse of the episode. This all felt a little staged to me, and, Meghan, you were right that FNL is too soft-hearted to rub Tyra out like The Wire would have. A couple of moments mollified me, though. The first was Landry's face when he hears that Tyra's excuse for skipping school is that her aunt is sick: He's heard that one before—the night he got his wisdom teeth out and Tyra was a no-show—and it underscores the degree to which he is her forever crushed-out keeper. Also satisfying: Eric's deft handling of Cash at the crucial moment, standing between him and Tami as she helped Tyra into the car. My husband thought Cash would have taken a swing, but I disagreed, because of the way Eric fills the screen. He's one bull that Cash won't ride.
Hanna, your analogy between Tyra and Lolita threw me at first, because our Tropicana Motel girl is 17 and looks 20. Pre-rescue, as she sat alone in the bar where Cash left her surrounded by skanky men, I flashed unwillingly to Jodie Foster in The Accused. But Tyra does shrink into a younger girl in the back of the Taylors' car, with her teary "yes, ma'am" in response to Tami's questions. It's all very sobering, I know, but I couldn't let go of Tami and Eric's lost night away together. Those fluffy white hotel robes! No wonder good principals are hard to find.
Yes, Dillon, Texas, has succumbed to the spell of a bad moon. Things get screwy and sad in this episode for pretty much everyone, from Eric and Tami to the kids—Tyra and Lyla and Mindy and the hapless "men" in their lives. In this episode, men fail and women turn their backs, one way or another. Even Matt is "failing" his grandmother, who suddenly wants assurances he'll be around to take care of her. (Emily, I agree: This new selfishness seemed a stretch; though I don't know much about dementia, and perhaps it could take this form.)
From a certain perspective, you could read this as an inverted object lesson in the danger of attachment. The object of your affection will never conform to the mood lighting of your inner fantasies. Of course, then there's "Sunny," as I now call Matt's earnest mom. Blond, elfin, soft-spoken, she's like the dream-mom lonely kids conjure up before they go to sleep, hoping she'll come rescue them from the dreariness that is life.
Which makes me wish we could see or hear from Matt's dad again. The show was brave to introduce Iraq as a topic in an earlier season (when we met Matt's dad in between tours overseas). And it's too bad the show won't make good on that introduction by letting us really get to know Matt's enlisted father. According to Faludi's theories of masculinity, he's the real deal, not an example of "ornamental bravery." Someone who looked male but turned out to be ornamental is Cash, that pill-popping, smile-flashing fraud. There's a lot of latent old-fashioned chivalry in the writing of this episode: Cash's big crime is letting other guys leer at his gal while he goes after money. (I wonder if this, too, is not an object lesson—a subliminal message to all the male breadwinners who privilege work and forget to spend any time taking care of the little lady. OK, probably not, but we could read it that way.)
This episode is certainly soap operatic—it's positively sudsy, in fact. But I did like the depiction of that awkward car ride home with Tyra, silence settling over everyone like a toxic cloud, all the shifting and twitching of being in a speeding vehicle eager to get home. You can see Tyra is shaken and will still grimace years later when, crossing a street, she happens to think back to this moment.
It's this moment, though, that also led me to suspect teenagers may hate this show. I have an enduring belief that I would have loved it back when I was 14. But I'm beginning to suspect I would've just thought it was "dumb." Not that I actually would have had any opinions, because my parents were busy making sure I was a permanent nerd: We had no TV at home. And this, it occurs to me some nights, must really be why I love Friday Night Lights. The show puts me in touch with an imagined teenage self I can relate to better than I now can to my real teenage self. In other words: Does this show capture something about being a teenager that a real live teenage girl can relate to? (Yes, and its name is Tim Riggins, says a little voice in my head.) Or does it cater to nostalgic adults like me, who want, for a moment, to feel that old sense of yearning entwined with the promise of old ideas like honor and grace?
Hanna, Emily, what do you think?
I confess: For me, the show lost something—a levity, a playfulness, a social depth—when it lost Smash.
Definitely nostalgic adults, I would say. With its teenagers burdened by heavy responsibilities, the show conforms to a line Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once used to describe Al Gore: "an old person's idea of a young person." One fan, Ruth Samuelson, wrote to say she interviewed football players from the school where the show was originally shot. They were all pretty lukewarm about the show and preferred MTV's Two-A-Days. Also, FNL is apparently one of the most popular among "affluent viewers," which can't be teenagers.
That said, I love your point, Meghan, about Shelby/Sunny—that she is an orphan's fantasy of a mother. This would explain her flatness, her angelic nature, and Matt's near-muteness. It would also attribute to the show a genuine child's-eye view.
One thought I had reading your descriptions of Mindy and Tyra: For the first time, Tyra fails where Mindy succeeds. Tyra is a victim in that skeevy dive of a bar, the terrified object of threatening male attention. Mindy, meanwhile, is using the skeevy bar as the source of her feminist liberation.
Now, all you die-hard fans, check out these rumors of two more seasons, and begin to ask yourselves the relevant questions: Can Tyra, Riggins, and Lyla all flunk senior year? Can they really shoot half of the next season in San Antonio, where Riggins apparently will be? Is J.D. man enough to inherit the drama?
This episode is all about daddy's little girls: Julie, Lyla, and J.D. "I just feel like it's different now … like I'm not daddy's little girl anymore," Julie says to Lyla after she's had sex with Matt. And, worse, been caught lying in bed afterward by her own father, complete with telltale crooning singer-songwriter on in the background. "Yeah," Lyla says, knowingly, though she doesn't spell out just what she knows. She's further down the path than her younger schoolmate. Unlike Julie, she's a daddy's little girl who really no longer has her daddy; she had to pick Buddy up from jail after he beat an associate to a pulp at the Landing Strip and caused an alleged $30,000 worth of damage. ("It's not even worth that much," Buddy complains.) Now Lyla's not just having sex with Riggins. She's shacked up with him, playing house in a home that has a poster of a bikini-clad girl bearing beer tacked to the wall. (By the way, I love that the scene between Lyla and Julie takes place as the two girls brush their teeth together in the Taylors' bathroom: soulful confession, scrunch-scrunch-scrunch. That brought me back.)
Then, of course, there's J.D., a girl in boy's clothing. (According to the show's gender lexicon, at least.) He goes to a party, where a perfectly coiffed redhead—more Gossip Girl than rally girl, I thought—asks him whether he wants an "appletini." "I don't drink," he stutters in response; she flirtatiously responds, "Well how about some milk? That could be your thing. A young … wholesome … milk-drinking … quarterback." Never has milk sounded so dirty. Madison (that's her name) is a sure thing, or so we're meant to think. All too soon, though, J.D. is breaking things off with her because—surprise, surprise—his father told him to. But he makes the crucial mistake of breaking up with her outside the team bus with the whole team watching. Riggins collars him. And, finally, the show explicitly deals with something I mentioned a while back, something that Joe McCoy just doesn't seem to get: As quarterback, J.D. is supposed to inspire and motivate his teammates. And there's no way he's going to seem like a leader to them when he's being dad-whipped. As Riggins puts it, "You know what's good before a game? Gettin' laid. A lot." J.D. says that's not going to be happening. And Riggins goes for the jugular: "How do you expect any of these guys to man up for you if you can't do that on your own? … You know you're a leader right? Start acting like one."
The sexual politics aren't very progressive, I guess, but on the other hand you could say that the idea of finding your own path, away from your parents and into your life, is the leitmotif of the episode and the girls actually do a better job of it. Both Lyla and Julie face a similar dilemma to J.D.'s: They have to choose whether to bow to their parents' wishes or be themselves. And they "man up" more than J.D. does: Lyla gets in Buddy's face when he calls her a "spoiled little brat" for running away from him to Riggins. Julie prickles when her mom says, "Your dad told me what happened at Matt's," but then she figures out how to get what she really needs. The truth is, she wants to talk to her mom about sex; she just doesn't want to be talked to like a child while the conversation takes place.
I thought this episode really captured that treacherous ground where parents and adolescents get stuck in a quagmire neither really wants to be in. Tami's face when she's asking Julie about birth control is a mess of supportive sympathy and heartbreak. She finally tells Julie what she really feels, not judgmentally, but humanly: "I wanted you to wait … because I wanted to protect you." And Julie says, "I didn't want to disappoint you." This was the best conversation about teen sex I've ever seen on TV, for sure. (And I think we wouldn't have seen one like this on the first season of the show, which was more male-oriented.) Do you two agree? Or did you have different feelings about this episode?
There's so much more to touch on—Matt and Coach Taylor, Landry and Tyra (and the wonderful Giving Tree sermon). But let me end with a question. Don't the writers kinda lay it on thick when Eric gets ejected from the game and Wade has to take over? Within about 30 seconds, the announcer is praising Wade's "inspired play calling" and then, after one touchdown, lauding him as "a bright and shining star on the Dylan football horizon." Tension between Wade and Eric (and, more to the point, Joe McCoy and Eric) has only been rising. Is this thick impasto of writerly praise foreshadowing of things to come? We're almost at the season's close, after all.
I agree, this episode is really interesting on the subject of female sexuality. The show bravely pairs two variations on the theme: daughters having sex and strippers. Julie has sex; Lyla shacks up with Riggins and is horrified by her dad's behavior at the Landing Strip, although just last episode, she was drinking and dancing with one of its performers. It's not all that progressive to group drifting daughters and pole dancers, as you say, Meghan, but mostly it's sex as seen from a father's point of view. That scene where Eric walks in on Julie and Matt in bed was so perfectly played and shot. "Ahh! Dad! Get out!" we hear as he's walking out the door. Also the later scene at the Taylor house where Eric wants to kill Matt but instead takes out all of his aggression on his grill.
The scene between Buddy and Lyla, meanwhile, unfolds almost like a lover's quarrel:
"Don't touch me," she says and runs into her room to start packing so she can move in with Riggins.
"Please don't leave me!" he yells to her.
I imagine it must be near impossible for a father to come to terms with his daughter having sex. A mom of a teenage boy once told me that after her son had sex, their relationship changed forever; to her, it was more of a parting than him leaving for college. But it was all sadness, with none of the muffled rage and disgust the men seem to feel. This might be stretching it, but I felt like Devin, the cute lesbian oracle, was voicing the subconscious of the dads in this episode when she said to Landry, "You're like a prostitute. But you don't get paid."
This is so different from how Tami handled Julie. I absolutely loved their talk, so much that I want to tape it and play it back to my daughter when the time comes, because surely I won't handle it so deftly. "Do you love Matt?" she asks. That is so absolutely the right thing to ask first, both because it's the important question and because it proves she respects how Julie made her decision. Then she smiles, twice, despite herself. I don't think, Meghan, that the last part about wanting her to wait is her "true feeling." I think that's the Everymom feeling—the difficulty of letting go. Her true feeling is in her smiles. She can't help but be happy for Julie. I also love that speech she gave afterward, about not having to do it every time.
One thing we haven't talked enough about: This show is so good at conveying meaning through silence and gesture. There's Eric's twitch, of course, but this episode was a veritable ballet of twinned gestures: McCoy drinking milk cuts to Buddy drinking whisky. Julie and Lyla brush their teeth, then Tami and Eric brush. Julie can't look at her dad during that car ride; Matt can't look at him in the locker room. Then when J.D.'s dad wants to make a point to his son on the basketball court, he yells, "Look at me!" three times. McCoy is not subtle enough for gestures, as opposed to Eric, who has a beautiful one when he walks out of Matt's house and tensely flips his hat.
I liked Eric losing his temper in the end. It had a very "we are all sinners" feel. The episode began with Buddy losing his temper and Eric restraining himself, just as he had in the previous episode when he didn't hit Cash. Badgering the ref was a proxy, I think, for throttling Matt, or Julie, or Buddy; better to lose your temper in the game than in your house. As for Wade's rising—that did seem abrupt, and a setup for McCoy feuds to come.
I do need to mention The Giving Tree. I have always found that the oddest, most depressing children's book. It is such a raw take on the selfless nature of parenting (much like the first few pages of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping). It also has the same problem as FNL: It seems to be written much more for adults than children. I hate reading it and can almost never get through it without choking up, for the sake of my future, bitter, empty-nest self. I'm glad Landry threw it at Tyra. She deserved it.
This was my favorite episode of the season. I kept admiring the craft: the short, tight scenes between different pairs of characters and the deft segues you mentioned, Hanna. (One more: the opening cut from Tyra in her car to the football players in theirs.) You can feel the care the writers are taking, and it's especially appreciated because they have only a few more hours to wind up the season.
I think Tami's true feelings about Julie are two contradictory things at once: She wanted her daughter to wait, and she's shakily relieved that Julie had sex in a way that won't damage her. Along with all the reasons you've both given for mounting this scene on a pedestal for its honesty and feeling, we get to see Tami's evolution about this subject, and for all the right reasons.
In the first season, Tami was all fiery mama bear after she spotted Matt buying condoms in the supermarket. (Watch it here at the nine-minute mark.) She confronted Julie, who tried to shrug off sex as "just putting one body part into another body part." Tami told her that thinking like that was evidence that Julie wasn't ready. She said that at 15, Julie wasn't allowed to have sex. And she warned her daughter that if she went ahead anyway, she could be hurt, and she could become hard. Now it's two years later. Julie is 17. She's not an adult, but she's a lot closer. We can see from their scenes together that she and Matt do love each other. She's not fooling herself. And she's not cavalier and pretend-sophisticated with her mom: She's shy and embarrassed but also sober. They talk about condoms—hallelujah, the parent-child birth-control conversation that went inexplicably missing in Juno.
Meghan, I've been mulling your great question last week, about whether we'd like FNL if we were Tyra and Julie and Lyla's age, by trying to commune with my 17-year-old self. Who really knows, of course, but my best guess is that I would have cherished Julie and Matt's relationship (along with, yes, all things Tim Riggins). I've been wondering, though, how I would have felt about Tami. She is wise, strong, sexual—a model of a mom, in a lot of ways. Even her lapses and freakouts mostly serve to make her more human.
As a fellow mom, I can't get enough of Tami. But as a teenage daughter? I dunno. I might have found Tami too good to take. If that's what your mom was really like, what would you find to despise in her, and don't teenage girls need to do that to their moms in some contained but significant way? When Julie tries to rebel or complain, a la her tattoo a few weeks ago, the scenes often don't really come off. But in this episode, my Tami doubts melted away because she put every ounce of her goodness and mettle to such excellent use.
Meanwhile, Katie McCoy showed some mettle, too. For the first time, she's standing up to her husband for turning J.D. into a daddy's boy. Meghan, you talked about Lyla and Julie manning up by finding a way to do what they want and go their own way. "Man up, Matt" is what Julie said when her guy suggested meeting her at the movies instead of coming to pick her up and face her dad. Here I think we're seeing Katie man up—a welcome break in the McCoy facade.
What about Tim Riggins, though? He's in guy's guy mode when he tells J.D. to man up, but his own manliness is increasingly bathed in soft light and dulcet tones. That parting shot of Tim and Lyla on the couch, after Tim quietly tells Buddy to please leave (note the "please") is a teenage fantasy that's both compelling and self-serious. The girl with the fallen father turns to the boyfriend whom she has reformed, and lo, he comes through for her. The children throw over the fathers and shack up, and they get to do it more in sorrow than in anger. Even Eric has lost it. What does this mean for how the season wraps up, I wonder?
This might have been my favorite episode, too. I may read the Eric scene differently—he loses his temper and gets ejected. But that seemed morally and ethically appropriate. The refs were being shady and dishonest. And in Texas, after all, there's a long history of men losing their tempers and taking justice into their own hands when the circumstances (usually corruption) call for it. The problem is that we're not in the ethic system of the Old West anymore; we're in the new West, where new money rules the day. And Eric's moral righteousness opened a window up for Wade to show his stuff. And Wade, of course, is the property of Joe McCoy, rich guy. And I worry that the show is opening up a space here. A very purposeful one: The old codes of male honor aren't enough to get you by anymore. You need to pander to the power structure, too. We'll see what happens, but that's clearly not the last we'll hear about Wade.
Meanwhile, everyone is growing up and preparing to move on. Somehow, this episode really caught the flavor of senior-year joy and melancholy: the way that suddenly you feel adult, replete in the new sensations of independence, and at the same time feel the pangs of change. A new life is just around the corner for a lot of these people—even if it's just the new life of being post-high school in Dillon, without a job. I spent this past week in West Texas, a couple of hundred miles from the real place that Buzz Bissinger wrote about in Friday Night Lights; the seniors in town had been getting their acceptance letters, and you could feel that same sense of nervy excitement around them. Things were going to change. I remember that feeling, and I was wondering if every Dairy Queen blizzard must suddenly seem a little sweeter.
Emily, I totally agree about Tami and my teenage self. You hit the nail on the head. That's precisely the part of the show that would have been hard for me to watch. She is so easy to relate to, so powerful and real, and I am not sure I would have wanted to all the time. When you're 17, you need to carve out a little cave to be in, separate from parents. And seeing parents be that involved—seeing yourself through their eyes—would have made me squirm. You don't want to see yourself through your parents' eyes at that age (or at least I didn't) because you have conflicting desires: You want to grow up and be your own agent in the world, but you also still want to be their little girl. Just like Julie says.
I think this season has made her a more sympathetic and interesting character. Which is important, because if the show does get picked up again, she'll have to play a larger part in it, I figure. Meanwhile—I guess Tyra redeemed herself for a bit, but I, too, was glad that Landry gave it to her with that Giving Tree speech. The show, though, indulged in one of its cheesiest moments this episode: the shot of Tyra watching Landry and his band play, where the lights of the bar cross her face, and she smiles. One of the few moments where it was too much, too obvious.
With just a week until President Barack Obama flies to Strasbourg, France, for his first NATO conference, his top advisers are still divided over what U.S. policy should be on the summit's No. 1 issue: how to fight the war in Afghanistan.
It's a debate that the Bush administration never seriously had in the seven years following the post-9/11 invasion. Now, by contrast, in the wake of three major strategic reviews, Obama is extending and deepening the discussion of Afghanistan, because the outcome of this debate may set the course of American foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency.
In the first days of his term, Obama placed strict limits on the war's objectives, shedding Bush's utopian rhetoric about turning Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy and focusing instead on merely keeping the place from reverting to a haven for global terrorists. But though he may initially have thought otherwise, this didn't settle questions of military strategy: how many troops should be deployed, what they should do when they get there, and how victory or defeat will be measured and appraised. This is what the debate inside the White House is about.
According to close observers, the key debate in the White House is whether the United States and NATO should wage a counterinsurgency campaign—securing the Afghan population, helping to provide basic services, and thus strengthening support for the government—or whether we should devote most of our resources to going after al-Qaida terrorists directly. Obviously, any plan will wind up doing at least a bit of both; the debate is over priorities and emphasis.
The advocates for a more purely counterterrorist (or CT) approach—led forcefully by Vice President Joe Biden—point out that, after all, we're in Afghanistan only because of al-Qaida and therefore we should focus on that threat and leave the rest to the Afghans. Yes, we should offer them aid and assistance, but neither their economic development nor the survival of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's regime should be what our troops are fighting and dying for.
The counterinsurgency (or COIN) advocates argue that only through their approach can al-Qaida and the Taliban be defeated. Hunting and killing terrorists has its place, but in the long run it only gives the enemy the initiative, lets them melt away into the landscape, and does little to stop new recruits from taking their place. The best way to keep al-Qaida at bay is to dry up its support by earning the trust of the civilian population, building roads, creating jobs, and striking power-sharing deals with tribal elders.
Some in the CT camp realize that the COIN-dinistas (as critics call them) have a point. Their real gripe with counterinsurgency is that it costs too much and promises too little. Even most COIN strategists acknowledge that a successful campaign, especially in Afghanistan, would require lots of troops (way more than President Obama has committed so far), lots of time (a decade or so), and lots of money (wiping out most or all of the savings achieved by the withdrawal from Iraq)—and even then the insurgents might still win.
A "targeted" CT campaign, its advocates say, would at least demonstrate the West's resolve in the war on terrorism and keep al-Qaida jihadists contained. It's a type of fighting that we know how to do, and its effects are measurable. One might also argue (I don't know if anyone on the inside is doing so) that it could serve as a holding action—a way of keeping Afghanistan from plunging deeper into chaos—while we focus more intently on diplomatic measures to stabilize neighboring Pakistan. If Pakistan blows up, curing Afghanistan of its problems will be irrelevant and, in any case, impossible.
Some in the COIN camp have sympathy for this argument—especially for the part about the high cost and the uncertainty of success—but they would argue back that a purely CT approach is sure to fail in the long run.
In short, it's a messy plate that President Obama's been handed, and his advisers' debate only highlights the dearth of good choices and the real chance that things might get still worse, no matter what he does. He scaled back the war's objectives, but the task is daunting all the same.
Obama has to choose one approach or the other this week, if he hasn't done so already. Afghanistan will fill the agenda at next week's NATO conference. He has said that he'll ask the allies to step up their involvement. But he can't expect them to accede unless he requests specific measures and explains how they fit into a clear strategic context, and he can't do that unless he decides what the strategy is.
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For the best summaries of COIN doctrine and strategy, spelled out by officers, consultants, and private scholars, see the Web site Abu Muqawama, the Small Wars Journal, Gen. David Petraeus' Army and Marine Corps field manual on counterinsurgency (or my summary of it), David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla, and John Nagl's Learning To Eat Soup With a Knife.