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Sandy Hook, And The Point Where Things Tipped

The sense of a tectonic shift on gun controls in the US strikes me as a surprising result of the shooting in Connecticut, mostly in a "why this one" sense. I mean, I think we all get that the depth of this tragedy is beyond the others - the number of kids, in an elementary school, obviously - but to suggest that this one is somehow "worse than the others" is to forget how bad what came before really was, and sets up a kind of hierarchy I'm loath to endorse.

But something shifted, and I'm fascinated at the cultural analysis. It's more than the kids. Other aspects of this tragedy, and its timing, have brought the usual defenders of absolute gun rights up short; there's a surprising silence, and an even more surprising amount of grudging acquiescence that staus quo on guns will simply be unaaceptable.

Part of what's tipped, I think, is location, in several senses; most obviously, this happened in the northeast, the bastion of liberals these days, as opposed to the recent examples in, say, Colorado or Arizona. And it suggests that the reactions of shock and horror were tempered by a sense, there, that gun culture is more commonly accepted. In the suburbs surrounding New York City, you get a lot (lot) less of that. And that's repeated along the coast, and coastal cities, from Maine to Maryland.

But I think one other locational aspect is that when you go north or west of the Eastern seaboard, one can forget how un-urban things get, real fast. Here in Northern Westchester, things get clear a mile or two out of town, especially at night: houses in the woods, well removed from bright lights and big cities, and big city notions of all sorts.  On one hand, as many commentators have noted, there's a sense of a suburban idylll being deeply disturbed; on the other, Newtown may really be more of an example of exurban, rather than suburban, life, where people really live out in the country, well away from an urban core. That's why the revelations of a survivalist, gun-heavy culture in rural CT may be less surprising than they seem at first blush. Anyone who's driven Route 84 across central Connecticut (and mid-Hudson Valley New York, for that matter) can attest to the odd lines between developed suburbs and truly rural country. And that lifestyle is not so far removed from other rural, exurban existences around cities South and West.

My point is that the tipping point here may not really about northeastern liberals and a sudden "here in our backyard" moment; no one needed to convince most liberals (at least the ones I know and experience round these parts, and in my lifetime) about the need for more gun regulation. And while some have pointed to this tragedy as another "urban vs. rural" tension, I think the real tipping point is that this happened in a semi-rural area which has deeply shaken the "can't happen in our suburban idyll" notions of many exurban dwellers, especailly (I'd bet), women. When the shootings happened in movie theaters and shopping malls (and one did, let's recall, in Newport California, less than 12 hours later), it was easy to separate those areas and activities from home. Strip malls may be dicey... but once you get off the main road and back to your neighborhood enclave.... it's all ok. When the shooting happens in the local area elementary school... that last illusion is shattered. Population density, like other demographic markers, may be the real key here. It's getting harder to find  a place to feel safe, even away from others. And that's a tipping point about how closely we want to manage the gun culture.

It's an interesting moment, this shift on guns; like a number of shifts in popular perception lately, I think politicians are playing catch-up with a public that's moved far and fast. That sense of catching up, combined with short memories, may not bode well for sweeping changes, or even modest incremental ones, on guns. But our next conversation on guns won't be like the least 20 years or so, I don't think. And still, we do have the problems around mental health, which are more complicated, and in many ways worse. And, as I've long suspected, it will be easier to focus on the guns and "do something" about them, than to look long and hard at how we deal with deeply disturbed people, especially disturbed young men. I don't think a demographic shift will fix that problem; that only comes when we develop more of a will to tackle the hard stuff. If ever.

 

Being Human

As a writer, I try not to repeat posts; I actually think this is a flaw, probably, because repetition provides a kind of consistency. You become the writer who, everyone knows, writes about "this," when you repeat yourself. But I find repetition boring, and really, I think, once I've said something, what else is there to say?

It was the shooting at Virginia Tech that was my moment on mass shootings. I said what I needed to say, and since then, I've been surprised at how, as shootings happen again and again, much of what I wrote then basically holds. There's an argument that we become inured to violence, but I find it's not the horror and sadness that goes away; it's the sense that we will re-embark on the same conversation we have, over and over in the aftermath. 

For me that conversation starts not with the guns, but with the mental illness. Over and over, these young men with serious illnesses and disabilities wind up committing astonishing acts of violence, yet we either throw up our hands, or say, "never mind that, the problem is guns." There is a gun problem to be sure; but the disastrous state of mental health services and the stigmas around dealing with mental illness is so essential to the state we're in, I can hardly breathe when I hear these things. "How did this happen?" people wail, each time. And each time, we discover, sadly, that there were people who did know, people who saw a disturbed person in need of help, and watched a system filled with cracks fail them. Over and over. And over. And over.

And yet... of course, the problem is guns. Guns that shoot multiple shots in a second, rounds and rounds of bullets fired in seconds (why don't we regulate and tax the bullets?). Clearly, at least some (and yes, I agree, much) of this stuff is madness. Gun controls will not stop these incidents... but lord, let's start somewhere and try to do something. The alternative, as we keep seeing, is chaos.

What was so weird about Friday, to me, was how the totality of the event became clear in degrees, even in the face of a sloppy reporting situation that may be one of the most embarrassing exercises in recent journalism (the misinformation and untruths bandied about all day Friday were honestly staggering). By the time President Obama spoke, the enormity of the event was unavoidable. So many children, so much death... so little meaning or point. Even a President noted for his coolness and near stoicism, could not fail to weep in public.

As Americans, our moments of collective connection in these splintered times is difficult, but a slow news week, difficult times and a truly horrific event brought us together as few things could. The killing of children, in a school, is inhuman. It defies every sense we have of being a human society. And, just for a minute, perhaps, we cut through the clutter of left and right and us and them, and all that, and for a minute we were all, just, human. And maybe, if we stick with being human for a bit... we can do something about this. I don't entirely believe this myself, but all this crying ought to result in something, shouldn't it?

 

DeMinted

Elections have consequences; that's the main lesson I guess we can take away from Jim DeMint's decision to flee the Senate and run the Heritage Foundation. Like most freely chosen job switches, DeMint's decision can be seen in 2 ways, I think: a comment on where he's leaving, or a sign of where he's going.

Lots of people, naturally focused on his leaving the Senate; though I think early reads on it missed the obvious fact that DeMint is leaving largely because the GOP lost, and for DeMint's purposes, lost huge. DeMint's been, in many ways, the Most Senior Elected Spokesman of the Tea Party movement, and his backing has been a 50/50 kiss of death. From Sarah Palin to Christine O'Donnell in Delaware to Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, DeMint's been a big proponent of "replacing RINOs", a discussion that's all but meaningless to most liberals. But that RINO thing is a big deal to conservatives, and their systematic housecleaning of the GOP goes a long way to explaining the Republican crack-up (and, by extension, the shape and size of the GOP problems since 2006, or more likely 2004).

DeMint will not be especially missed; from Lindsay Graham to Mitch McConnell, it was mostly "so long, and thanks for... er, nothing." But his fleeing speaks volumes to the fact that DeMint is in some ways more of a realist than his colleagues - hence his rush to embace a Tea Party movement I'm not convinced even he entirely likes - and gets that, for now anyway, it's not going to be much fun to be a Republican in elected office. DeMint may be a conservative true believer, but if he thought he could really effectively push conservatism in government, he'd have stayed. At the same time, DeMint's canary in the coal mine move does offer some idea of how Republicans could pull it together more: getting rid of gadfly outliers (DeMint was no great shakes as an actual legislator) and drawing some lines about unacceptable extremes remains, to my mind, the base starting point of any serious Republican effort to regain lost ground.

At the same time, it's even more interesting to contemplate DeMint's rush to run Heritage. Up until yesterday, I don't think anyone knew or cared who was actually running Heritage, outside of Washington's right wing elite, and even there, Heritage seemed sort of an afterthought. There's more cachet at the top of the right wing think tank heap for the American Enterpirse Institute, and even though the Cato Institute is in a bit of a mess, they too have a higher profile and more of a specific (libertarian) voice.

This move, it strikes me, is about raising Heritgae's profile and its ability to make the news cycle with bomb throwing quotes; DeMint is not an especially serious ideas guy, not someone who puts the "think" in "think tank." He is, on the other hand, popular with Rush and Hannity and Mark Levin and the other Demi-Gods of talk radio, and an easy booking for Fox News, sure to be quoted and talked about (and, for now, a bigger star than the rest of the room at Heritage). Remaking Heritage into a louder, less thoughtful, angrier thing may well be the kind of brand definition the place needs. How that will help conservatives be more impactful or change the national conversation, I think, is harder to fathom.

DeMint and the Board of Heritage may be right that DeMint can resahpe the place into something more winning (even if, like, oh, say, President Obama, DeMint has essentially no executive experience). But from here, it's hard to see how simply being louder and more visible, angrier and more right wing helps either Heritage or the conservative movement in the long run, absent interesting ideas and a sense of renewed energy and fresh perspectives. Still DeMint was probably right to flee the Senate now, cash in and join the conservative money circuit while the getting is good. I'd just say the wise move might be to bank that cash before the far right gets seriously marginalized and cut off. I mean, the idea that  conservativism, done louder will somehow seem more winning is just... demented.

Benghazi Folds Five

I keep hoping, each time I hear a report, or watch yet anther pointless round robin of the usual suspects that some piece of information, some discussion... something, will finally end the national nightmare over "Benghazi". I'm not so naive - as some liberals were - that the election would silence the right, or prove them wrong... but surely, something had to come up that would shut this thing down.

I've given up on that thinking since Susan Rice went to Capitol Hill and apparently solved nothing by meeting with Senators who have been critical of her. Just what they're critical of, about her or the "talking points" she gave on Benghazi, still eludes me; but clearly, whatever happened in those meetings didn't help. Maybe, as some say, they could never have helped. But still, here we are.

What happened in Benghazi was indeed horrific and deserves to be examined and explained more fully. But I think the "problem of Benghazi" is, for our political discussions, something much more deep about three interlocking issues related to our current foreign policy that can't really be solved. 

The first is that just as Republicans lack a coherent domestic pllicy, they lack any sort of coherence when it comes to foreign policy issues as well. This was, if nothing else, the take away from the third Presidential debate, when Mitt Romney failed to really define any substantial foreign policy difference between himself and Barack Obama. Critics, and cynics, will point out that this is partly because the President is running a right-wing foreign policy, but I tend to agree more with people who say that we would benefit, mostly, from a robust debate of competing approaches to complicated foreign policy issues, and we're suffering for a lack of it. What we do "about Benghazi", how we deal with international terrorism, how we unwind our presence in Afghanistan... all of these issues and more (Iran? Israel?) are issues that don't even have a shrill, right/left partisan debate. Because, mostly, the right has nothing on most anything foreign. And that, really, is their problem, not the left's.

Second, this "debate over Susan Rice", even as it strikes me as stunningly pointless, tends to serve as a reminder that the President (still) has a small, insular group of insiders who serve as his primary set of advisors and confidantes, and he's done little or nothing to broaden that circle. I suspect that the President is deeply upset about how Rice has been treated, and lacks some perspective on the whole mess. I tend to think that attacks by people like McCain and Graham are similarly personally driven, and I don't think all of this is some triple secret scenario in which Senators want John Kerry to be appointed so Scott Brown can fill the remainder of his term. Mostly, I think something - I can't remotely speculate what - about Rice has been off putting or unfortunate, that it comes across in private discussions (though I think she was genuinely less than helpful in those "Benghazi explanation" appearances), and the objections to the idea of her as Secretary of State are meaningful and serious. I think the fact that a number of prominent Democrats - Kerry, Clinton, even the President - have let this mess unravel is indicative of some feeling that she's not going to get Secretary of State. I'll be fascinated to find out why.

But Third, the reason Rice and this "Benghazi scandal" is such a pointless exercise is because there isn't really a good answer about what to do about Libya since the removal of Qaddafi. Just as there's no good answer about how to deal with Egypt, just as there's little the US can do in the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. the reality of foreign policy at this moment in our history is that we are not in a position to be the World's Judge, Jury or Policeman. We're not good at it, and we don't have the resources for it.  Republicans, after all, in some ways really only want to bring up Benghazi because they think some military force should have, or could have, fixed it - a notion that is obviously and demonstrably incorrect. Beyond that, they've never had an answer about how to deal with Libya, because in some ways, in terms of our national interests, we were better off with even a crazy strongman like Qaddafi in charge than the uncertainty and danger of what's happened since.

And this, the thing about danger and uncertainty, the problems that our entirely beyond our capacity as a nation to solve, is the thing that explains a lot about why Americans don't particularly like to engage in the long, difficult discussions that revolve around American foreign policy. It's difficult, it's messy, our pratcical needs can't always (or maybe ever) live up to our notions of our good intentions and our best selves, and we, as a nation, tend to prefer the story in which we are the hero, and the doers of right and good, where bad and evil can be easily defined. And we haven't had it that easy since World War 2.

My friend J asked me, a few posts back, just how I could justify, in any way, the foreign policy of the Bush and Obama Administrations of using drones and targeted assassinations to combat terrorism. And the answer I have, is, like this post, only that I think foreign policy is messy, that we as Americans can't fool ourselves into simplistic ideas about being the heroes of our own stories, and that in a world with complexities and hard choices, I, like many others, am comfortable with the idea that drone strikes are an effective way to prevent future plans of mass terrorism in the US. Is that a good answer, or the right answer to how America should act on the international stage? No I suppose it's not right, it's not good... it's just the way things seem to be, just now. And until we get a better, more robust, more honest, and more reflective foreign policy debate in this country, I think we're just kind of stuck.  And "the truth about Benghazi" is certainly not going to set us free.

The Retail Worker's Dark Weekend

For various reasons, I try never to shop on "Black Friday Weekend", avoiding the post-Thanksgiving madness and the media-constructed frenzy of shop-til-you-drop consumerist Americans and their lemming-like trip to the malls. I've worked in retail too long to see the romance, I don't like crowds, and frankly, the "bargains" of this shopping holiday are overstated.

It's also the case, these days, that I will probably also be working for most of it.

Black Friday this year was notable for a couple of things - one was the encroachment of the shopping into the actual Thursday of Thanksgiving, and the second was a planned, notable, if debatably successful attempt at labor actions outside of many Wal-Marts around the country. Even by the organizers' generous assessments, the number of workers participating in these protests was in the hundreds, though media coverage did clearly amplify the noise and the effect of the protests.

The remarkable thing, really, is that it's taken much of my lifetime for Thanksgiving to be breached by retailers as sacrosanct; only Easter Sunday - and Christmas Day, I suppose - remain as the day of no shopping, and that anachronism may be the hardest to topple, but it's also the one that makes the least sense (at some point, Christian traditionalism will be damned). Literally 20 years ago, I was having conversations with family and friends that one day, obviously, retailers would launch the "Thanksgiving Day Sale" - I mean, heck, one day, Macy*s was sure to notice that there was a crowd of people outside the store after that darn parade, if nothing else - and one more domino would fall on the notion that for one day, at least, we could forestall the real American pastime (shopping, not football).

Let's be clear: we don't close stores for the sake of shoppers. Keeping shopping out of Thanksgiving wasn't some kind of "have respect for this important American holiday, consumerism can wait." No, the point of closing stores was simple human decency for the American worker. Let's take one day, just one day, and nobody, or almost nobody, should have to work. The problem with Thanksgiving, arguably, started with my company, Starbucks; we're the most major corporation I know of that sees no particular reason to close its outlets on any holiday at all. Almost all Starbucks are open on Thanksgiving, for at least some portion of the normal day. Many are open on Christmas. We are almost all open on Easter, normal hours. We close early on days like New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July. But we are open. Always open. And people get bewildered when we close, even for obvious practical reasons, like a hurricane.

But Starbucks isn't just a restaurant - food being the general exception to "closed on the holiday" - we are a retailer, and we are located in shopping centers and malls like the other retailers and we sell more than just drinks and food and we're helping, I think, to erode the idea tbat there's one day, any day, when a retailer should be closed. 

And the people who get punished, when we lose even one day of being closed... are workers.

I was struck, this year, by the fact that, however small, people (and the media) seemed to take nte of the workers. It wasn't a big story, and it was surely subsumed by the stories of stampedes and fights and all the attendant madness of crowds. But the Wal-Mart action and the Thursday opens did get people talking, and talking about what these things mean to workers. Which is, after all, almost all of us. We are a nation of service workers, now, and it means that many of us work to serve the rest of us. It's a different equation about work and what we think of people who serve and it's complicated... and I think we're only just beginning to sort out the cultural and social implications, never mind the political and economic ones.

The Wal-Mart action revived the favorite liberal topics of how bad the big W is, how badly its workers are treated... but Wal-Mart in many ways is really just a stand-in for most of retailing, where the wages are low, the hours are long, and the rights of workers mean but so much. Attempts to unionize most retail workers, in or out of Wal-Mart, are rarely successful, and are unlikely to succeed en masse or long term. To say this is to be labeled "anti-union", and I'm not; but the realities are stark. I've been in retail a long time, and I've known many, many of the women (mostly) and men who work there. Don't take my word for it... but most of them are not interested in a union. And won't be. They are students and mothers and transient and free thinkers. Not being organized provides a kind of flexibility and set of options many workers want, and even need. Unions have not found a way to convince retail workers, generally, of their value long term. And still, that's unlikely to change much.

Even more to the point, as I've said before, because we are no longer a nation of mostly manufacturing jobs, Unions do not really respresent the majority experience of most workers in this country now. Yet "Organized Labor" is allowed, mostly by Democrats, to serve as the "Working Person's Voice" even when the policies unions promote don't necessarily refelects the needs and opinions of most workers. What we need, really, is a change in how we talk and think about the issues of work and labor in this country, and try harder to develop a sensible labor policy that reflects who we actually are and what we actually do. That's why, I suspect, the Affordable Care Act has managed, quietly, to be  a key selling point of President Obama and the Democrats this past election - it's not perfect, but it makes sure many workers will get health insurance, a practical slution many people need. Similarly with the debates of contraception and abortion - in the place where airy philosophical debates mean less than the practical issues of real people actually face.

I don't think we can "save Thanksgiving" from the retail encroachment; the wall has been breached, business needs have overtaken simple decency and humane respect for workers and their families. We will, as we do, work around these new relaities. We are workers, after all. But I think this year may mark another, more refreshing turning point, one where the discussions around our working lives, and the pratcical need for a life beyond work, begins to become more public, louder, and more insistent. It doesn't mean service workers will unionize, and new laws may not be the answer (certainbly, that's not the whole answer); the change we need is cultural, social... not just political, and not just economic. 

And I could go on... but I really have to get on with my day - I have to work this evening.

The Awesome Award: Speaking Truth To Fast And Furious

For weeks, I've been debating saying something - though never exactly sure what - about the "Fast and Furious scandal", Darrel Issa and Eric Holder. Like Kevin Drum, I figured I had a rough idea what the story was. And like Kevin, I heard about this article in Fortune. Well, it does turn out that the article is brilliant, and up-ends virtually everything we think we know about the whole story of Fast and Furious, and the ATF's attempt to reduce illegal gun sales in the Phoenix area. 

Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Katherine Eban is going on to suggest, apparently, that the Obama Aministration's real failure - shades of Shirley Sherrod - is that the White House is too skittish about giving conservatives ammunition for bad PR to actually figure out the underlying details of the manufactured "scandal." This, after all, rings far more accurately than suggestions of some massive "cover up" at the Justice Department, rather just the small, sad example, yet again, of an Administration to cautious to actually stand up for the actual people who are being wronged.

I haven't given an "awesome" award in awhile, but this article is genuinely awesome. It demands to be read and shared. Please try and do both.

Learning to Madison

I haven't written a lot about politics in a while. Hell, I haven't written much of anything in a while. Oh well.

Last night, I got mildly caught up in the angst of Wisconsin's recall election. But not too much... which probably goes some ways to explaining why a seemingly controversial, not exactly popular Governor managed to survive one of the few recall elections ever held (though apparently he's the only one who ever survived.

There's lots of talk about the "money in politics" part of this story, and no doubt, throwing millions and millions of dollars at a desired result has to help, but I just wanted to take note of a few of the less popular, less liberal friendly lessons this election might be giving us. Not to annoy anyone - even my closest friends have given up on me ever being a proper liberal - just to lay out some of the political issues that the left struggles with. So here, as they kind of occurred to me:

• Elections are local, and specific choices between actual people. There was lots of blather, last night, from people who don't live in Wisconsin, about the Governor's race, but I was struck by the fact that this election was basically a replay of the last one... and Tom Barrettt lost that one, too. I don't live there, I have no idea what Barrett's been like as Mayor of Madison. But apparently, Wisconsin does. There's a part of this story, I think, that both hasn't been told, and relates to the local scene. And I'm not sure many people not in Wisconsin really care what the details are. But they probably matter to how this election shook out. A corollary from this is that it's hard to extrapolate a "national message" here, though conservatives would like this to prove that Mitt Romney can/will beat President Obama. I don't buy that, not yet anyway. 
• Unions represent a small fraction of the entire populace. This is a reality that frustrates many lefties and makes it hard to come up with a new kind of liberal politics, because Union paricipation in the Democratic Party - financially, through volunteerism, and with expectations for return on investment - is out of proportion to that reality. We are well past the old romantic days of a manufacturing based working class well spoken for by union bosses, and liberal and Democratic Party politics have to move past those old mindsets. That's not an "antiunion" sentiment... but to the extent that this election was a referendum on public sector unions, the votes reflected a couple of unhappy corollaries: non-union households are not especially sympathetic to the remaining union gripes, and lots of people think it's reasonable to rein in government spending by cracking down on union benefits, which are perceived as plush.  Democrats can't stop Walker and Walker-like conservatives while clinging to outdated notions of "pro-union" boilerplate.
• Don't pretend there isn't a fiscal crisis. Walker's anti-union push was built on the noiton of making "hard choices" for how to deal with reducing government spending. I get that many liberlas don't like this, but Walker won by making these "hard choices" sound reasonable, and part of his success was that opposition to it sounded myopic and unrealistic. And while I don't think Wisconsin has huge national implications, there is a point to be made here about the coming budget, debt celing and tax fights in Washington: "raise taxes on millionaires" is hardly a serious approach to reining in spending or addressing revenue issues. 
• You can't fight money with nothing. Nobody wants to feel bought, and few want to think of themselves as mindless sheep, easily driven by propaganda to a desired result. All of the "this was about money" griping can't evade the fact that removing Walker was not unachievable, even with millionaires sinking lots of money into a desired result. Which is why I keep saying liberals need more of a call to action than anger and resentment towards a small number of rich people. People vote FOR things; and liberals who care should figure out why so many people - especially people who could have been persuaded otherwise - voted for Scott Walker. Again. Ideas matter, laying out a choice matters, and anger alone isn't a strategy. 

On Hookers And Secret Services

Okay... so where were we?

I've been sort of chomping at the bit to comment on various stories - Ann Romney, George Zimmerman, you name it - but nothing is quite as captivating as the scandalous non-scandal of The Secret Service in Cartagena, now, is it? (And really... Cartagena? Other than Romancing The Stone... who's ever cared about Cartagena?)

My raction to the Secret Service story hasn't changed much since it broke: so... apparently after work the agents like to drink, carouse a bit, and maybe pick up a local resident for some R&R. And that's bad... why?

I'm not trying to excuse hooking, but in my own curiously twisted thinking on sex and sexuality, it's not people paying for sex that bothers me. What bothered me, say, about the Elliot Spitzer scandal, and made it scandalous, was both the outrageous prices he paid (which was simply foolish) and the fact that being Attorney General means enforcing the laws he was breaking at that time. That's hypocrisy, and that, it strikes me, is scandalous.

(Also, going to prostitutes while married strikes me as tacky and poor moral character, but that's a separate issue.)

So here's my thing: if the Secret Service agents were, say, using counterfeit money to pay hookers... then maybe we'd have a similar case; but  drinking in bars and bringing someone home for sex doesn't strike, entirely, as a firing offense. Again, tacky, perhaps; but not quite the federal crime it's being made out to be. Indeed, I'll be curious to see if some of these attempts to discipline Secret Service employees stand up as proper for a federal employer. Is off hour behavior really fair game for the government as an employer?

In any case, there's been a lot of huffing and puffing to try and dress up what is basically a salacious exercise in peeking behind other people's bedroom curtains as somehow a major breach of national security. You can almost see the visible relief of many media organizations reporting today's triumph "hooker may have been in President's hotel!" That's, you know, serious. It's almost like, you know, she was in the President's room. Except, you know, she wasn't.

All the heavy breathing doesn't amount to much, and can't really make the agent's behavior seem much more than what it is - tawdry, mostly, with a side order of tasteless. The idea that patronizing hookers might "lead to blackmail" is an old saw that was always meant to comment more on sexual behavior than any actual threat - it's the same nonsense that was trotted out about gays during the Red Scare years, and just as dopey. It's a suggestion that sex is dirty, embarrassing, and rather than be humiliated for a peccadillo, most people would, I don't know, pay thousands and reveal state secrets. Evidence of this actually happening isn't just mostly scarce... it's basically nonexistent. It's the stuff of movie plots and bad novels one buys in airports.

More to the point, these ideas of salacious blackmail seem especially absurd in this era where people's nude photos wind up on internet websites. Shocking? Embarrassing? Does anyone even know what these words mean anymore? The small number of people actually "shocked" to discover that Secret Service agents hire hookers lead especially sheltered lives and are, in general, awfully naive (almost as naive as the people who seem to think this only happened, once, in Cartagena). There's nothing especially shocking, or possibly even embarrassing about the President's guards getting randy after hours in a foreign country. The trope that this "could lead to national security breaches" is pretty much nonsense, and most sensible people, I suspect, get that, even if they hate to admit it. Because once you admit it... then we also have to admit that this story is getting way more play than it ever deserved.

I don't think, as Americans, we'll ever get over our nosiness, our voyeuristic tendencies, or our confused notions about sex generally. That's our culture, and that's how we define who we are - simultaneously wildly open and free, and puritanical and judge-y, all at once. By all means, go overseas and go wild with the foreigners. Just don't get caught. Or we'll really be mad. And if it helps us to pretend that somehow this is crucial to our "national interests", it's just a reminder of the lengths we go to when we need to justify our prejudices. Mostly, I suspect, the excessive interest in this story is about envy. And that's never pretty. And we're lousy at hiding it.

 

This American Lie

Maybe it's just a matter of timing - I didn't see it until late Friday afternoon, and the paid blogosphere does seem to cut out before Happy Hour on Fridays - but I'm surprised that the exposure of Mike Daisey as something of a fraud isn't resonating more on the right.

That may sound odd, but bear with me.

The discrediting of NPR has been an odd hobbyhorse of the right's most ardent screechers, something about the confluence of soothing voices, liberal boilerplate, and perceived objectivity, from what I can tell (roll that all up in a ball and you get... Nina Totenberg). James O'Keefe, in one of his more amusing sideshows, helped take out the head of fundraising at NPR with a tape of a conversation with a fake Middle Eastern investor, which led to a stunning series of off-point comments from senior officials at NPR that mostly made matters worse. NPR was also at the center of the Juan Williams "scandal", in which Williams was dropped as a commentator after telling Bill O'Reilly that he harbored suspicions that Muslims on his flights were possibly terrorists. 

Given all that, surely someone on the right will spend the weekend chortling as This American Life, one of NPR's most popular shows, has had to retract its most popular podcast, an episode recorded with Mike Daisey about Apple's dubious record manufacturing iPads and iPhones in China. Adapted from his monologue "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs", "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" garnered a lot of attention, and started a string of modestly bad press for Apple, which has tried to minimize the fallout while trying to beef up standards at its plants (and I say "modestly bad" because none of it has really hurt Apple's sales or profits). 

Daisey's claims - that Apple's plants were rife with child workers and exposure to dangerous chemicals, among other horrendous practices - had been questioned by knowledgable reporters (though the practices were also confirmed by their reporting), but it wasn't until this week that Marketplace, PRI's business show (also on NPR), found Daisey's chinese translator who was with him on that trip, who said much of what Daisey claimed to witness - speaking to child workers, or observing workers injured from chemical exposure - never happened. Daisey calls it "dramatic license", now, and TAL is red faced.

But this isn't really just about This American Life; the New York Times has already had to issue its own correction to an online op-ed Daisey wrote making similar claims, and the Associated Press is looking at retracting coverage they did of Daisey on the topic as well. Others will surely follow. Even New York's Public Theater, where Daisey's show has been running, had to issue a statement generally supporting Daisey, but admitting that the show is not exactly entirely accurate (and that's okay, cause that's how drama works. Or something).

Perhaps you can see where I'm going with this - this is a "Mainstream Media" disaster of large proportions, undermining a popular storyline (corporate malfeasance! Cheap Chinese manufacturing practices! Labor rights!) that the right already can't stand. And this, really, is a classic unforced error: no James O'Keefe fakery needed, no dicey ideologue like Juan Williams to make the scapegoat. This was, as Ira Glass admitted, simply shoddy journalism that tends to undermine the credibility of a show like This American Life - failing to ask basic questions, check primary sources, or to make sure that information was fully confirmed. It doesn't help that TAL often comes off as smug, slightly sanctimonious, and hipper than thou on most topics it covers; this was hubris waiting for a fall.

Conservatives may shy away form this because it is, after all, Apple; on the one hand, an emblem of exactly the kind of capitalism they want to enshrine, while at the same time, a do-gooder sort of firm that liberals love to shop because it seems hip and cool and socially conscious. Embracing the discrediting of Daisey, when Apple still faces unpleasant questions about its corporate actions and conditions in factories, could easily be a two-edged sword, and it may just be that conservatives miss the connections: all that raling against MSM and bad journalism is less potent when there's no obvious political payoff.

On the other hand, it's the very clean spin of the Daisey case that I think should give lefty defenders of NPR through the previous scandals some pause: it's one thing to have been pranked by O'Keefe and his ilk, it's no fun having to defend the notion that Juan Williams didn't deserve all of what he got... but the through-line here is much like the unraveling of the NYT after Jayson Blair: lying to your editors shouldn't be this easy, and it's just arrogance to have missed the signs that this report was seriously flawed. Many lefties will, no doubt, want to take the line that Daisey's real disaster is undermining the efforts to investigate Chinese factories. But this, really, amounts to "he may have stretched the truth, but he wasn't wrong" and that's not true. This wasn't stretching, it was fabrication and falsehoods. Journalism can't let that stand. And NPR, as a whole and not just on one program, probably needs to reexamine its mission and how that mission is pursued. 

Most imortantly, though, is that listeners probably need to also ak more questions, and take less reporting at face value. That's the reality of our current American Lives.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: And I'd Rather Be On A Yacht In Greece

Cory Finley, a recent Yale graduate, applied to work at Bridgewater Associates, a large Connecticut-based hedge fund, during his senior year of college. Mr. Finley, 23, said there was “definitely something tempting” about the structure and prestige of a high-paying finance job. But he decided to follow his dream of becoming a playwright instead.

            - Kevin Roose, "Wall Street's Latest Campus Recruiting Crisis" in the New York Times.

Now, look, I'm sure that the financial crisis and the pressure on banks and investment firms to limit bonuses has changed the career plans of some college seniors... but come on. The kid who says "I thought about investment banking, but then decided to be a playwright" is hardly a serious example of what, I suspect, is a dubious trend article anyway. Aside from Finley, Roose has found about one other college grad to speak to their recruiting experience, and padded the article with obvious quotes about how this week's disgruntled resignation letter in the Op-Ed section proves no one wants to work at Goldman Sachs. Is that a trend? Probably not. But back to our poet. Nothing says "I don't need to work" like a 23 year old who can take all the time he needs to craft a play. I know I wanted to take some time off after graduating college and write a novel. Unfortunately, I also needed to do things like eat, and have a roof over my head. Still do. But if anyone wants to fund my foray into novel writing, let me know. I'm totally worth it.