Archive Listing
June 1, 2005 - May 25, 2005
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
FREEDOM OF SONG. If celebrities are going to keep popping off about their politics, then somebody has to start keeping track. Here's what we're going to do: when some millionaire actor or singer shares his wisdom with the public, we're going to look into his credentials and share them with you. Everyone is entitled to speak his mind, but we are also entitled to inquire into the quality of any mind that insists on speaking into the giant mass media microphone. Our lucky first candidate for this exercise is Linda Ronstadt, who recently shared some of her views with the San Diego Union Tribune:
"This is an election year, and I think
we're in desperate trouble and it's time for people to speak up and not
pipe down. It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find
out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian.
It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."
Her enjoyment certainly got clouded at the Aladdin Hotel-Casino the
other night. If she'd rather not have known about the Republicans in
the audience, she sure was rolling the dice when she decided to
dedicate a song to Michael Moore. They came up snake eyes. Neal Boortz
summed up the incident this way:
Before singing "Desperado," she called
Moore "a great American patriot" and "someone who is spreading the
truth." She encouraged everybody to see the movie about President
Bush. So what happened next? Did the audience just
roll their eyes and wait for the song to start? Nope...they
revolted. In addition to their loud boos, hundreds of
concert-goers stormed out of the theater, tore down her concert posters
and tossed their cocktails into the air. Nice work by the
audience.
The president of the place, a Brit named Bill Timmins, told the AP
Ronstadt had to go. He didn't let her back into her luxury hotel
suite and had her escorted off the premises to her tour bus. He
then had her suite emptied of her stuff and had it delivered to her and
told her that she was not welcome to return.
When I call a plumber, I don't expect him to lecture me about the
mechanics of good writing. And when I go to a concert, I don't expect a
singer to hector me with a political spiel. So what are Linda
Ronstadt's credentials for presuming to inflict her political insights
on an audience which has just paid her a lot of money to sing songs?
Here's what her bio
says:
Linda Maria Ronstadt was born on July 15, 1946, in Tucson, Arizona. Her father was Mexican and her mother was German. Her first singing group was with her two siblings in the group, The Three Ronstadts.
Linda attended Arizona State University,
where she met guitarist Bob Kimmel. He tried to persuade her to go to
Los Angeles with him, but she declined because she wanted to stay in
school. After a semester, however, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a
career in music. In 1964, she joined Kimmel and songwriter, Kenny
Edwards, in a folk group called the Stone Poneys.
Pretty impressive. Instead of dropping out of school immediately after freshman registration, she was was so determined to get an education that she remained enrolled for an entire semester. That's not quite enough time to declare a major, however, which means that Linda is, in fact, just a high school graduate who had an interpretive artistic talent sufficient to earn her millions of dollars. This should earn her respect as a singer, which it has, but it does not lend her any credibility whatsoever as a film reviewer, political affairs analyst, or arbiter of truth.
Linda Ronstadt would do well to heed the advice Laura Ingraham
offers in her book Shut Up and Sing, which is that
she should, well, shut up and sing. Why do I accord more weight to the
pronouncements of Laura than Linda? Laura Ingraham
can't sing, but she did finish school. She graduated from Dartmouth
College and the University of Virginia Law School. She also clerked for
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and she gets paid for talking
and writing about her political views. If she were to start singing at
a stop on one of her book tours, I would expect people to start
throwing things at her. They might even yell at her: "Shut up and
talk!" That's how life works. It might not be fair, but it sure is life.
Monday, July 19, 2004
Perhaps this should have prepared us for the article on Kerry in the current issue of The New Yorker. It's by a staffer named Philip Gourevitch, who's one of those nonpartisan but highly intelligent and slightly condescending voices the country's snootiest magazine has blessed us with for the better part of a century. As usual, the article begins with several headers, the first being 'Fact' in big red letters, followed by 'Campaign Journal,' also in red, and then 'Damage Control,' the byline, and, finally, the message: Voters need to believe that John Kerry can put the country back on track. Note the subtlety of New Yorker prose; Philip is threading the needle somewhere between an objective statement and a low-key push in the right direction.
It may seem from my detailed introduction to the piece that I am suggesting a word-by-word consumption of Philip's lengthy analysis of Kerry and his foreign policy quandary. I am not. Rather, I'm going to offer some tips on the best way to extract the delicate flavor of journalistic writing that is more like wine than beer or a shot of bar-brand bourbon. It takes finesse, patience, a certain restraint, and some strict methodology. Permit me to demonstrate.
It's never necessary to read the first few sentences of a New Yorker lede. These are always exercises in deliberate digression, a coy feint in one or two different directions from where the piece is really going. There's going to be some useless but artfully phrased detail, and then a slow wide downward turn into the actual subject. A sample of the useless, irrelevant detail in Philip's opening paragraph:
Nobody cares about Dean. There's no point in reading this part. The article doesn't begin until we start getting artfully overblown details about Kerry himself, which happens in the next sentence:
Yes, folks. A New Yorker article is always a journey, from some remote incident the author has identified as a touchstone or beginning of some kind, through various highways and byways, with stops along the way to marvel at pretty scenery, before arriving somewhat indirectly at a conclusion which is more to be inferred by the reader than stated directly by the writer. And since everything important happens in the form of trenchant anecdotes or nuanced dependent clauses, it's a process of acculturation to the writer's tone more than anything else. There isn't really going to be an argument to follow, only a flavor and a bouquet to be appraised. It's like a wine-tasting. And for that reason there's no need to guzzle the whole bottle.
To appreciate Philip's unique insight about Kerry, we need only take a sip now and then and roll it carefully around our tongues. Some eye-rolling doesn't hurt either. Here's a sip:
The worse the 'crisis,' the less need there is for the opposition to speak about it. Cool. We're obviously dealing with vintage grape here, nothing showy or loud about it, but smooth and inoffensive. Kerry would do it 'differently.' Ah.
In a wine-tasting, there is a step known as clearing the palate. It involves consuming a cracker or some other neutral but absorbing taste that restores the taste buds to a state not compromised by the previous sip. It's no different with reading a New Yorker piece. For those who don't know how to clear the palate after a paragraph like that, try this.
You see how it works? Now we're ready to return to the calm reasonableness of Philip's prose for another go:
Despite the bloody and embittering disarray of Iraqi life after more than a year under the American dispensation, Bush describes the Iraq adventure as a great success for the cause of freedom—exactly as he said it would be before the war. The main change in attitude lies in the grammatical perspective, a shift in tense from future perfect to present continuous. If anything, Bush’s insistence on the righteousness of his script has intensified. He jokes about never reading newspapers, lets it be known that he communicates with the Almighty, and dismisses his critics as pessimists. He told the nation that if he had made any mistakes he was unaware of them, and he said, “I fully understand the consequences of what we’re doing. We’re changing the world.”
It takes some fine writing to make decisiveness and resolve look weakly inept compared to constant vacillation. But that's why The New Yorker pays Philip the big bucks. Without ever abandoning his reasoned and finely calibrated precision of language, Philip has -- almost inadvertently, it would seem -- reminded us that George W. Bush is an illiterate fundamentalist boob who seems out of place appearing in the same sentence with the word "grammatical." Does it even matter what the issues are? All we need is to know that Kerry can "admit a mistake" and that he would never be guilty of the kinds of excesses every decent person scorns in George Bush. Well done, Philip.
Once again, it's time to clear the palate. Here's another cracker.
The important thing to remember about our sips is that they can be almost random. Here's one more:
The mission he had in mind was elaborate:
involving the U.N. and nato
and an international high commissioner in a dizzying hatchwork of
overlapping and shared authority. It was as lavish an expression of
multilateralism as the Bush mission is stark in its unilateralism. But,
while there were too many notes in the composition of Kerry’s dream
coalition, it struck the signature chord of his campaign’s foreign
policy unmistakably: that “America is safer and stronger when it is
respected around the world, not feared,” and that such respect must
come from strong alliances, forged by the hard work of diplomatic
persuasion under committed Presidential leadership. “Now the question,”
Kerry announced. “Why would others join a cause that they did not
support in the first place? For one simple reason: it’s in their
profound self-interest. And the President needs to put that
self-interest on the table and before the world.”
I could have used the paragraph before this or the paragraph after.
I could have skipped ahead or stayed near the beginning. The result is
almost invariably the same. We have learned the taste of Philip's wine,
and it seems to be the same even after a mouthful of neutralizing
cracker. Anyone need another mouthful now? Here you go.
The reading lesson is almost concluded. Obviously, it is permissible to
read the whole interminable article. It's just not necessary. It's
principally about perceiving the tone, which encapsulates anything that
might otherwise be measurable as fact or logic. It's still generally a
good idea to taste the end of the piece, just to make sure that no
sensory errors have skewed our perceptions along the way. Herewith the
end of Philip's masterpiece:
Holbrooke said, “This is a referendum on Bush and Iraq. We’ve got a long way to go to the election, and three undetermined events are key here—what happens in Iraq, whether we kill or capture bin Laden, and whether or not there is a terrorist attack in the United States.”
Kerry doesn’t disagree, although he told me, “No matter what happens, the economy is going to be important. But I think these guys—what they’re trying to do to me reflects their bankruptcy of ideas. They don’t have a real economic plan, except for the tax cut. They don’t have a real health-care plan. They don’t have a plan for education, except the broken promise of ‘No Child Left Behind.’ So, therefore, what do they do? They attack, they attack, they attack, they attack. And I will continue to talk throughout this campaign about foreign policy and the war on terror and how to make America more secure.” That was the bottom line, he said: “I think we can do better. I know we can do better. I absolutely know we can do better.” By John Kerry’s own assessment, doing better is a woefully low standard—and that, he told me, was precisely what made him run for President. “I just said, ‘This has gotta stop.’”
Yep. No mistake. And just to wrap things up as neatly as possible, a
final cracker.
Palate clear now? Good.
Sunday, July 18, 2004
UPDATE. Chastened by the July 15 entry in InstaPunk, some teenage girls have decided to fight back against the fashion requirement to dress like hookers. The CBS Early Show reports on the phenomenon here. Be sure to watch the video feature accessed via a button in the upper left corner of the screen. No word yet on whether a similar movement has been started by teenagers who feel it's time to learn something in school besides sexual techniques.
French president Jacques Chirac ( left) and Gallic hope Thomas Voeckler
Only Italian Ivan Basso managed to stay with the five-time champion on the devastating ascent to the Plateau de Beille, the last of seven climbs on a sun-baked, 127.7-mile trek through the Pyrenees.
As Armstrong and Basso rode through cheering crowds along the steep, snaking road, other riders scattered down the mountain, their hopes of dethroning the 32-year-old Texan evaporating with the sweat off their brows.
Jan Ullrich, considered Armstrong's
toughest rival, conceded defeat
after the steep 9.9-mile climb mined with hairpin turns.
I have rarely pushed myself so hard," said Ullrich, the 1997 Tour champ and five-time runner-up. "But after seven mountains and more than 200 kilometers under conditions that should really be ideal for me, I must admit: Lance appears to be unbeatable this year."
Ullrich has finished second to Armstrong three times.
French champion Thomas Voeckler held onto
the overall lead and the
prized yellow jersey — barely. In Friday and Saturday's stages in the
Pyrenees, Armstrong trimmed Voeckler's lead from more than nine minutes
to just 22 seconds.
Asked to comment, President Chirac blasted what he called "typical
American aggression and Texas bullying tactics" and called upon the U.N. and
the European Union to pass sanctions against the "imperialist
aspirations" of U.S. bicyclists.
Particularly galling to Chirac and the French government was the
AP's recital of the impending humiliation of French champion Thomas
Voeckler, who wears the yellow shirt of Tour leadership and
contemporary French valor:
"I hung onto this jersey with my guts," he said.
Armstrong, who had set out Saturday with the aim of taking back the yellow jersey he so covets, was impressed. He said his team kept telling him through his radio that Voeckler was being left far behind — only to reverse course and say he was still hanging in.
"It's incredible," Armstrong said. "This guy has real panache.
"He deserves to have that jersey for
another day or however long
until he loses it."
But lose it he will. Armstrong is no doubt planning to take it from
him when the Tour passes nearer Vichy on the way to Paris. Panache the
French indubitably have, but it is no more deeply ingrained in the
national character than the talent, and propensity, for surrender. Let
us all hope that Chirac's current spite will melt into the usual
acceptance of defeat and its accompanying dismissive shrug. Otherwise,
many future votes in the U.N. Security Council may be tainted by Gallic
spite.
Ah well. C'est la guerre. GO LANCE!
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Nasty, awful, hurtful bumper stickers
Friday, July 16, 2004
I'll dispose of the freedom of speech nonsense first. Slim-Fast is not preventing Whoopi from speaking her mind. There is nothing in the Constitution that protects a speaker from public or private opprobrium when she chooses to make provocative remarks. The guarantee is that she is permitted to speak, not that she must be uniformly admired by everyone for having done so.
Much is made of the fact that she is a black woman, as if this were somehow the catalyst for Republican outrage at her joke. This would seem to smuggle it into the arena of civil rights or feminism. I'll leave the civil rights (i.e., racial) ramifications to others, though I expect no rational discourse on this aspect of it in a political environment that regards it as admissible for Julian Bond to insult the presidency far more viciously than Whoopi has done. I'm much more interested in the feminist perspective. How might feminists view Whoopi's decision to insult the president by comparing him to female genitalia? And how far would they go to defend her right to do this?
A brave Canadian gentleman named Neil Boyd has just a written a book decrying the excesses of hardline feminism as it is practiced in the heart of its power base, the academic institutions. It is called Big Sister: How Extreme Feminism Has Betrayed the Fight for Sexual Equality, and it describes events from Boyd's own experience as a pro-feminist academic who tried to arbitrate gender issues at a Canadian university.
His musings led him to a couple of strong convictions that resulted in his book. His key points are easily summarized:
"My opposition," Boyd explains, "is to a poisonous strain of feminism, a concoction of regressive policies only masquerading as belonging to a vanguard of progressive thought or action. The people behind these policies oppose free expression and due process and favour solving complex problems through an inflexible imposition of punishment by the state."
They are, he writes elsewhere, "a cadre
of radical extremists who are spouting bogus science and silencing
their critics with a combination of illogical mantras and vicious
tirades." Even worse, in their prudery and intolerance, they have made
common cause with "the evangelicals who want paintings and sculptures
of naked women or men removed from the workplace and from all forms of
advertising."
Boyd gives four examples where radical
feminists have gone too far: They are intolerant of all pornography;
they have defined sexual harassment in ways that are too vague and that
ultimately infantilize women; they are apt to define any male sexual
advance as rape; and they exaggerate the extent to which women are the
victims of domestic violence.
This doesn't look good for Whoopi. It would certainly seem that the
hardline feminist prudery would not sanction Whoopi's anatomical
references. Nor, if they disapproved her speech, would they be likely
to defend it. None of us is supposed to notice or mention the fact that
women's bodies differ from men's in any way, and in the new etiquette,
we are being urged to conduct all our social interactions as if there
were no such thing as physical bodies, attractive or otherwise, or
clothing,
attractive or otherwise.
But does anyone seriously expect that the feminists won't leap to
Whoopi's defense? Of course they will. Because the feminist mentality
is capable of maintaining exactly opposite convictions without
recognizing any contradiction. Thus, we have feminists who
simultaneously espouse the absurd sexual harrassment standards Boyd
cites while cheering the quasi-pornographic career of Madonna and the
jailbait tartiness that has made Britney Spears a superstar. Her
particular brand of sex-based success is called 'girlpower.' The bottom
line is that women are permitted to flaunt themselves as nakedly
(pun intended) as they will, whereas men are not supposed to read their
behavior or dress as an invitation to initiate sexual contact.
This is a ridiculous double standard which can be summed up by a
conversation I reported elsewhere. A female acquaintance of mine -- an
academic feminist -- was inveighing against pornography, but in passing
she allowed that erotica was okay. I asked her to define the difference
between the two. She hemmed and hawed for a while and finally conceded
that erotica is what women find exciting and pornography is what men
find exciting. Even when she realized the import of her definition, she
had no problem with it and argued for its validity.
Whatever women decide is decent to do or say about sexual matters,
even sexual anatomy, in public is acceptable. The best proof of this is
the self-celebrating theatrical phenomenon-cum-holiday entitled The
Vagina Monologues. If you haven't heard of it, here is a brief
description:
The structure of the piece is pretty
simple: [Playwright] Ensler describes the project, which was to
interview a large and diverse sample of women about their vaginas—how
they feel about them, what they call them, etc.—and present a selection
of the results as a series of monologues, sort of on the model of Anna
Deavere Smith’s recreated interviews in Fires in the Mirror and other
pieces, linked by material about how each interview was collected.
Ensler doesn’t adhere rigidly to that structure, but that’s the basic
device. There are no props or sets, though there’s a nice lighting
design that helps dramatize the material.
Does it get explicit? Yes.
...The next two bits—after a Hallmark
Card moment quoting a wise-child six-year-old, which actually evoked an
“Awww” from behind me—are definitely open to criticism. The first is
the “cunt” riff. Much of this is a kind of rhapsody on the word itself,
taking it one phoneme at a time and lingering ecstatically over each as
the full word is built up. Then comes a comic turn on the reactions
women can still get by saying “cunt” in public. Then comes a
recommendation to “reclaim” it, not only as a synonym for “vagina,” but
as a metonym for “woman”....
For those who haven't been following this kind of theater, do not delude yourselves that this is an off-off-Broadway experiiment. It has become an institution. Every year since 1998, there has been an event called V-Day:
The Vagina Monologues initiated V-Day, a global annual event that raises funds and promotes awareness to stop violence against women. The first V-Day was held on Valentine's Day 1998 in New York, featuring a gala performance of The Vagina Monologues with celebrated artists including Winona Ryder, Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Lily Tomlin, Calista Flockhart, Rosie Perez and Marisa Tomei. The second V-Day was held in London in 1999, and featured Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Melanie Griffith and Gillian Anderson. V-Day 2000 was celebrated in Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Aspen, and on over 150 college campuses throughout the country. V-Day 2001 was celebrated on over 300 college campuses and at Madison Square Garden.
In The
Vagina
Monologues, Ensler gives voice
to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, brave, highly original and
thoroughly human stories. Based on interviews with a diverse group of
women, the play brazenly explores the humor, power, pain, wisdom,
outrage, mystery, and excitement hidden in vaginas. Having seen The
Vagina Monologues, no one - woman or man - will ever look at the
world the same way again.
Is anyone starting to see a new problem here, a new
contradiction for the feminists to blink away? To understand it, we'll
have to look a little deeper into the career of Whoopi Goldberg. Her
bio is mostly missing from movie websites, but imdb.com tells us the
following about her background:
Whoopi Goldberg was born in New York City in 1955, as Caryn Elaine Johnson. She was born in Chelsea, in New York City. She worked in a funeral parlor, and as a bricklayer, while taking small parts on Broadway. She moved to California and worked with improv groups, including Spontaneous Combustion, and developed her skills as a stand up comedienne
It was while she was in San Francisco that the author of the first piece about The Vagina Monologues above, John Burke, saw her perform a bit he believed to be a kind of anticipation of Ensler's play:
Elsewhere, we find confirmation that Whoopi was not just a casual one-time performer in the play. Part of it was apparently written for her:
She also has a continuing relationship with Eve Ensler, sharing the same honors with her at "The Center":
Even Amazon.com has discovered a link between the two of them in its own online marketing efforts.
All of this demonstrates pretty conclusively that Whoopi Goldberg has a lot invested in the subject of vaginas -- one might even say in the politics of vaginas. Why, then, would she say in a political forum, in reference to the president, that "bush should stay where it belongs"? In this context, "where it belongs" is generally understood to mean "out of sight, out of mind." This from the same woman who is practically the patron saint of a work that contains:
If we're permitted to translate, this means that in her choice of language, Whoopi was actually comparing President Bush to "woman." At this point she's in a hopeless situation. Either she has just libeled her own sex, or she has delivered a fake insult or no insult at all to the hated Republican president. What could she have been thinking? What can all the big league feminists be thinking now?
Well, maybe she wasn't, and they aren't. That's the only way around this metaset of contradictions. It's the way they usually take.
If the Republicans were on their toes at all, they'd thank Whoopi for the honor she did the president by comparing him to this most important metonym in the universe. How could anyone take objection to that?
Thursday, July 15, 2004
THE KIDS. The National Endowment for the
Arts has issued a report that documents a continuing and accelerating
decline in literary reading in all parts of the American population.
Literary reading is defined as novels, plays, and poetry, although in
the report's statistics a juvenile romance novel counts the same as Moby Dick. And to qualify as a
literary reader, all you have to do is read one book in the course of a year.
Here's the worst news:
The steepest decline -- and the one that the report notes with most alarm -- has occurred among young adults. In 1982, respondents ages 18 to 34 were the group most likely to report the recreational reading of literature. Over the intervening decades, they have become the group least likely to do so (except for some segments of the population over 65).
The change has been particularly striking among those ages 18 to 24. The report says that, over the past two decades, the share of the adult population engaged in literary reading declined by 18 points, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2002. But for the 18-to-24 cohort, the drop has been faster, sinking from 59.8 percent to 42.8 percent, a decline of 28 percent.
"Reading at Risk" states that the trends among young readers (or, perhaps, nonreaders) suggest that "unless some effective solution is found, literary culture, and literacy in general, will continue to worsen."
"Indeed, at the current rate of loss," it
says, "literary reading as
a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century."
The statistics aren't surprising, but they are stark. Close to 60
percent of the 18 to 24 crowd don't read even one book -- not a
mystery, not a thriller, nada -- in a year.
Maybe they're tired out from all the schoolwork they've done to
become so proficient at math and science. Since 1995, an organization
called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMMS)
has been monitoring and testing the proficiency of high school seniors
in these subjects worldwide. The latest full study was conducted in
1998, when today's 24 year olds would have been taking the test. How
did they do?
One of the more ominous findings in the latest study is that even the American students taking advanced courses could not measure up to students from other nations. In math, they ranked 15th out of 16 nations. In physics, U.S. seniors ranked dead last.
In general math and science, American seniors ranked near the bottom among 21 nations.
Japan and China, usually the gold-medal performers in past studies of younger grades, did not participate in the seniors' round of the multiyear study.
Instead, U.S. seniors were outgunned in basic math by Sweden, Switzerland and Germany, among others; creamed in science by Canada; and overpowered in physics by the very country that is supposed to be looking to the United States for scientific expertise, Russia.
Only 11 percent of U.S. seniors
understood, for example, one of the most basic concepts of energy
conservation: that the amount of light energy produced by a lamp is
less than the amount of electrical energy used to power the lamp in the
first place.
Of course, math and science aren't as interesting as some other
subjects. You can be hopeless with a calculator and still have quite a
powerful interest in, say, history. Or maybe it's better not to say
history because the picture doesn't look good there, either. Apparently
we haven't been teaching this subject to kids for quite a long time
now, if these citations by the National
History Day program are true:
-
A 2000 Gallup Youth Survey shows that only 4 in 10 teenagers know that 1492 was the year that Columbus discovered America.
-
The 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 17 percent of fourth graders, 14 percent of eighth graders, and 11 percent of twelfth graders were judged to be “proficient” in their knowledge of history. Over one-third of fourth and eighth graders failed to reach the “basic” level and more than half of the twelfth graders surveyed could not even achieve a “basic” understanding of the history of their own Nation.
-
The 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 27 percent of America’s students knew what the U.S. Constitution was.
-
A 2000 study done by American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that nearly 80 percent of graduating college seniors from the nation’s top 55 college and universities failed when asked questions from a basic high school history exam.
To be fair, there are many great academic minds who are working to eliminate this problem, For example, an education professor named Sam Wineburg wrote an article explaining that "American students have always performed dismally on history tests designed to gauge factual knowledge." A few more articles like his, and we should all be able to breathe easier. But our mission is to figure out what it is that young Americans are doing that leaves them no time or inclination for reading, and obviously history isn't it.
Maybe it's all the great quality family time we Americans enjoy, especially at the dinner hour when all kinds of fascinating topics can be chewed over with the rib roast. Except that's not happening either, according to a 2002 article in the Christian Science Monitor:
Thirty percent fewer families come together for dinner today than did 20 years ago, and fewer than 15 percent of today's American families eat supper regularly (five to seven times per week).
It's no wonder; families are tugged in dozens of directions these days. Even the most conscientious parents sometimes load kids into the car during dinner hour with a juice box and pizza slice in hand - or allow their teens to skip supper night after night.
But a recent survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) might make parents think twice.
According to the survey,
teenagers are particularly vulnerable to skipped suppers. CASA found,
for example, that teens from families who eat dinner together were less
likely to use illegal drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes than teenagers who
rarely eat dinner with parents.
Aha. Drugs. That must be it. That's where the time goes. Only --
according to the experts -- it isn't where the time goes. Drug use
trends for the younger generation are headed downward. A December 2003 announcement
by the Department of Health & Human Services was full of good news:
HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson and John
P. Walters, Director of
National Drug Control Policy, today released results of the 2003
Monitoring the Future survey, showing an 11 percent decline in drug use
by 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students over the past two years. The
finding translates into 400,000 fewer teen drug users over two years...
Current use (past 30
days) of any illicit drug between 2001 and 2003 among students declined
11 percent, from 19.4 percent to 17.3 percent. Similar declines were
seen for past year use (11%, from 31.8% to 28.3%) and lifetime use (9%,
from 41.0% to 37.4%).
The survey indicated that alcohol use is also declining modestly,
although no percentages were offered of usage levels or changes. It's
probably safe to assume there's still quite a bit of drinking going on,
and cynics might point out that 17 percent of youngsters engaged in
illicit drug use of any kind isn't a cause for celebration even if the
overall trends seem favorable. At least some of the time spent not
reading is likely being allocated to partying.
Where are we? There don't seem to be any intellectual pursuits to
speak of in the younger crowd. No reading, no math or scientific
interests, no historical curiosity, no long family talks by the
fireplace. There is time required, of course, for work or school. Where
else does the time go?
One big part of the answer is participating in the pop culture. This
involves shopping, watching TV, surfing the Internet, and listening to
music. Here's a hodgepodge of statistics cited by Media Scope:
- Teenage boys spend about $84 a week, girls $83; boys spend more of their own money each week than do girls while girls spend more of their parents' money than do guys.
- Teens spend more than 90% of their earnings, or about $67 a week, on merchandise, health and beauty aids, and entertainment.
- Each year, teenage girls spend over $4 billion on cosmetics.
- 35% of teens are interested in getting a credit card; 32% of teens already have personal credit cards; 9% of teens have access to their parent's credit card.
- The average American spends 9.2 hours each day using consumer media.
- More households report having video game equipment (62%), than having a subscription to a daily newspaper (50%). Of those U.S. homes with children, 70% own video game systems
- 18% of teenagers 13-17 read "often," 50% read "sometimes" and 32% "never" read.
- American children who have home video games play with them about 90 minutes a day.
- Teenagers spend an average of 2.5 weekday hours on a home computer
- 66% of U.S. children have a television set in their bedrooms.
- Children spend about 28 hours per week watching television. Over the course of a year, this is twice as much time as they spend in school.
- Teenage boys spend nearly twice as much time watching MTV as reading for pleasure.
- 2.5% of 12- to 17-year-olds watch network news.
- Teens ages 12-20 make up 16% of the population, but purchase 26% of movie tickets.
- 63% of kids ages 9-17 say that seeing the latest movies is important.
- 54% of kids view a movie on a VCR three or more days a week and 47% see a movie in a theater at least once a month.
- American teenagers listen to an estimated 10,500 hours of rock music between the 7th and 12th grades-- just 500 fewer hours than they spend in school over twelve years.
- 80% of 12- to 14-year-olds and 75% of 9- to 12- year-olds watch music videos.
- can name three of the Three Stooges than can name the three
branches of government (59% to 41%)
- know the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air than know the Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court (94.7% to 2.2%)
- know which city has the zip code "90210" than the city in which
the US Constitution was written (75% to 25%), and
- know the star of the motion picture "Titanic" than know the Vice President of the United States (90% to 74%).
Back in the late 1990s, Media Scope reported:
- Nationwide, nearly half (48.4%) of high school students have had sexual intercourse at least once.
- Only 13% of 13-to 15-year-olds have had sex, as compared to 38% of 16-to 17- year-olds.
- By senior year of high school, two-thirds of students have had intercourse.
- 7.2% of all students initiated sexual intercourse before 13 years of age. 21.7% percent of black adolescents lost their virginity before age 13, as did 4% of whites and 7.7% of Latinos.
- Almost one million teenagers become pregnant every year; more than half of these pregnancies are carried to term.
- 2% of teenagers say abortion or pregnancy is the biggest problem facing teens.
Innocent is hardly a word that can be used at all with respect to this group. The National Coalition of Parents, Children & Families {NCPCF) has accumulated the following sourced statistics:
- Three million of the visitors to adult web sites in September
2000 were age 17 or younger
- Sex is the number 1 topic searched on the internet
- “For the 20-year-old kid, porn stars have kind of replaced what models used to represent.”
- 39 million homes receive the adult channels in scrambled form, while the number of children with potential exposure to such images is about 29 million
- 21 percent of teens say they have looked at something on the Internet that they wouldn’t want their parents to know
- A survey of 600 households conducted by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children found that 20% of parents do not know any of their children’s Internet passwords, instant messaging nicknames or email addresses.
- Only 5% of parents recognized the acronym POS (parent over shoulder) and only 1% could identify WTGP (want to go private?), both of which are used frequently by teens when instant messaging
- Median age for the first use of pornography: boys: 11-13 girls: 12-14
- An estimated 18% of girls who are 15 years old will have a baby before age 20
- In grades 7-12, 23.4% of first sexual relationships are one-night stands
- 33 percent of guys and 23% of girls feel some or a lot of pressure to have sex
- Women ages 20-24 obtain 32% of all abortions
- 82 percent of teens did not use birth control pills during last sexual intercourse
- Approximately 19 million new cases of STDs occurred in 2000, of which 9.1 million (48%) were among young people ages 15-24
- 78 percent of new cases of genital herpes were caused by a virus found chiefly in the mouths of 16-21 year olds
- 65 percent of all sexually transmitted infections contracted by Americans in one single year will occur in people under age 24
- 75 percent of prime time television in the 1999-2000 season
included sexual content
- 23 percent of couples in scenes with intercourse appeared to be ages 18-24.
- Movies have an 87% likelihood of presenting sexual material
- The average American adolescent will view nearly 14,000 sexual references per year.
Like it or not, modern American culture is permeated with sex: from the steamy billboards foresting Times Square to the proliferation of "porn studies" on college campuses; from pop song lyrics to R-rated movies to the wild popularity of Internet porn sites.
One major retailer went so far with its sexually based marketing as to be accused of selling pornography:
A case in point is the recent brouhaha over Abercrombie & Fitch's peddling of sexually suggestive thong underwear to young girls.
The rear-less underwear, decorated with pictures of cherries and catchphrases like "kiss me," "wink wink" and "eye candy," sparked an outcry from conservative groups when it hit store shelves earlier this year.
But seven isn't much younger than the age at which some parents take their kids to see supposedly wholesome performers like Janet Jackson and Britney Spears, who have become role models (NSFW) to little girls who want to know how they should dress, speak, and behave. The boys have role models too: foul-mouthed rappers who shout doggerel about pimps, ho's, guns, and violence. And this is no passing fad. Rap has been with us so long that graying veterans like Snoop Dogg have become acceptable as advertising icons and television hosts. Snoop Dogg was asked to host Saturday Night Live even though one of his sideline businesses makes what many people would call pornographic movies.
Now: does anyone want to wonder why the Internet is knee deep in child pornography? (It is impossible to do a search for information about pre-teen sexual activity without turning up more invitations to predophile sites than sources of research data, as I learned in preparing this entry.) And does anyone dare to ask who is making the pornography? Why, it's our kids. Many if not most of the webcam girls are college students, working their way through school: set up a live sex website and put your marketing major to good use. In just the past year the University of Indiana has played host to a porn producer who used IU students in a sex film shot on campus, Penn State University has sponsored an event called Cuntfest, hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of college girls on spring break have contributed amateur performances to dozens of video products (NSFW) featuring nudity and sexual antics, and dozens of college "humor" websites propagate pornographic materials (NSFW) that couldn't exist without willing (or at least susceptible) participants.
What have we prepared these youngsters to be? Porn performers and porn purveyors. If the rundown of their attainments enumerated above can be read like a resume, what else would you hire the kids of today to do? We began by considering the distressing phenomenon that literature is dying through inattention. Kids who won't read literature are certainly never going to write it. Their interest, to the extent that they have any, lies in the exact opposite direction. Because pornography in its many forms is the exact opposite of real art. Its purpose is not to elevate, illuminate, and inspire, but to drive from the mind all thought that does not pertain to sex. What other kind of thought have we equipped these children to entertain? And who will we have to blame when they leave their great monument behind -- a multimedia mountain of prurient crap that will finally bury the literature we never taught them to read or appreciate.
Do you have the nerve to look inside the box and see what is being created there? Our beloved American kids are destined to be porn stars. Aren't you proud of what so much emphasis on self-esteem and self-actualization has wrought. I know I am.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
BREAKING NOW...
Britney Baldwin Steinway
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Orson Scott Card.
When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future.
Now, almost a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. There's no guarantee that this is permanent, of course. But it certainly has the left in a panic. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows--remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing?
Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. How could such a thing happen? Scott Collins, author of "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN," thinks he has the answer.
It's not what Fox claims--that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. How they got this idea is that they were . . . hmmm . . . idiots? But no matter. Mr. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage).
I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish "Crazy Like a Fox" and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Mr. Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Mr. Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which are deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news--they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "we report, you decide" and "fair and balanced," they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News.
So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News.
But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger.
So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news?
In a story on Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror."
Let's see, how could there be any bias in that? Every word is true, right?
Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Mr. Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point.
The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. How is Mr. Rumsfeld's not resigning news? It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it.
This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies--at least politically.
Does it happen to everybody? Or just Republicans? Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton, making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that President Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs."
Nope. You've never seen it, and you never will. Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media.
The only differences between Fox News and all the other news media are (1) they admit that on some issues they take sides, and (2) they allow the conservative side to be heard--without contempt.
Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Why?
First, it implies that the rest of the news media aren't patriotic. Well, duh. Come on, prior to 9/11--and even after it--they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. You can't have it both ways, kids.
Second, it's pandering to the ignorant unwashed masses of Americans who want their news from people who are "on our side." Again, duh. When a nation is at war--which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are--we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes--and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness.
In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. From someone who is one of us. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it.
Suspected Islamic militant--this pussyfooting appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But presumably they are only "suspected" of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or--who knows?--maybe Timothy McVeigh's buddies from the "red states" in America.
That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust. Why in the world is there any need for the news writers to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on?
This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing. Fox makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us"--in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us.
In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Mr. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. Ms. Hajela is not out to "get" him.
After summarizing Mr. Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Ms. Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Then Ms. Hajela quotes the Rev. Conrad Tillard of Roxbury, Mass., at some length. Obviously, it was Mr. Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Mr. Cosby was "news" again--though Mr. Cosby gets the headline to himself because who would read an article headlined "Rev. Tillard answers Cosby"?
Mr. Tillard is first quoted as saying that "Cosby 'could absolutely have' gone even further," and though slavery and Jim Crow had hurt African-Americans, "at the end of the day, we have got to turn the tide." But then Mr. Tillard is quoted as explaining that the real danger of Mr. Cosby's remarks is that white people (i.e., racists) will "seize upon that and try to castigate the African-American community. The conservatives and liberals are far too quick to seize upon a statement and say to the rest of us, 'See, see, it's not us, it's you.' What they have not wanted to acknowledge is that there are still legacies of slavery."
How is this biased? In this editorial-masquerading-as-news, Ms. Hajela is providing us with a "clincher" that tells us what we are supposed to learn from all this: that it would be a bad thing for Americans to let the racists off the hook by telling blacks that they are causing some of their own problems.
Harmless? Sure. In fact, I agree with Ms. Hajela's editorial. But it was in the news pages, and it was not news, and it was not impartial. It was shaped and designed solely to cause readers to reach a certain opinion.
Nobody was quoted as saying, "Cosby was absolutely right, it's ridiculous to keep complaining about things that are completely under our own control. We can teach our children to learn standard English and get a good education. We can teach our children not to become criminals, and can hold them responsible for their actions when they do commit crimes, instead of blaming racism."
Ultimately, both the "pro" and "con" quotes said the same thing: Mr. Cosby had a point, but he shouldn't say it openly because it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Very PC. Don't we all feel better now?
This is as vague a way of saying "What this movie actually shows is scientific nonsense" as you could possibly imagine.
The bulk of the article--especially the crucial first paragraphs and the large-type inset, which are all that most people ever read--say quite a different thing. In answer to the question "could the climate really go bonkers, just like that?" the answer in the article was "Maybe. That was the consensus among researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a leading center for climate studies."
The next paragraph includes a quote from the observatory's director, G. Michael Purdy: "This is not fantasy. It's happened before. It's well documented."
Which quote will leave the clearest impression in the readers' minds? The fact is, what Mr. Purdy was saying was "not fantasy" and has "happened before" is Manhattan being covered in ice. That was during the Ice Age. It didn't happen in one big storm. And it wasn't caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions.
Furthermore, any institution calling itself an "earth observatory" has a built-in bias. They want to wrap themselves in the much more fact-based science of astronomy, but this isn't an observatory as most of us understand it, it's a group of scientists who have gathered together specifically because they already are true believers in a certain set of viewpoints about the human impact on the environment.
And the large-type inset absolutely treats global warming as a fact (it is still only a suspicion, by rational standards) and ends with this statement, attributed to no one: "Scientists believe this is probably due to man-made 'greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere." Which scientists? Are there scientists who disagree? These matters are not even addressed.
The whole point of this article is to make sure that the people who read it take "The Day After Tomorrow" far more seriously than the film deserves. Why? Because global warming has become one of the weapons used in the political war to bring down Western civilization, and without necessarily realizing it, the left-biased news media are completely buying into that political agenda.
Keep in mind that there is no way of knowing whether human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing or preventing disaster, mostly because we don't yet understand the causes of the natural cycles that lead to ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. So at this point, there is zero scientific basis for action. There is only the quasireligious premise that any human change to nature is dangerous and bad. Therefore, if human activities produce gases that might cause a disaster, then we can't afford to wait until the connection is actually proven. We must stop emitting those gases right now.
What they don't tell you is that the only way they are proposing to stop emitting those gases is to have such a drastic change in the activities of Western civilization that it might well lead to devastating impoverishment, and probably to famine and a catastrophic drop in the human population.
But the reporters covering science in America today are so wretchedly miseducated that they don't even know what questions to ask when interviewing biased sources. And they are perfectly willing to make ridiculous statements--which would include any sentence beginning with "scientists believe."
This is the postreligious equivalent of a fundamentalist preacher starting a sentence with "The Bible says." It invokes authority without context, without understanding, and without admitting the possibility of error. (Most self-respecting fundamentalist preachers would at least tell you which book in the Bible they were quoting.)
The fact is that Mr. Broecker is an important scientist, and his model of the "conveyor belt" of warm water in the Atlantic provides a plausible explanation for how ice-age climate changes might happen and why they seem to be restricted to the northern hemisphere, at least in the most recent ice-age events.
But the article in the paper was not science or even respectable science reporting. It was designed as propaganda to convince readers that smart people all agree that global warming can cause an ice age like the one depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow," unless we make the radical changes required to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to levels that true believers claim (but cannot prove) would prevent this disaster.
If the evidence of global warming were a report of burglars operating in your neighborhood, there's enough of it to cause you to check that your doors and windows are locked--but the true believers want you to respond by boarding up your house and moving to another state.
The left-wing news media live in a tiny village of people who all think (or pretend to think) exactly alike. Therefore, to them any reporter or media outlet that rejects their premises must be insane or dishonest, and instead of seeking to refute them with actual evidence, they merely call them names and accuse them of venal motives.
The fact remains that on Fox News, and only on Fox News, we get television reportage that gives us at least two sides of every important issue. On all the other TV news outlets--and "mainstream" newspapers--we mostly get coverage that is hopelessly biased. The madmen have taken over the asylum and now, dressed in white lab coats, they pronounce the rest of the world insane.
Keep in mind that I found these egregious examples of bias in a single issue of a single newspaper, randomly chosen. I could do the same thing with any national news broadcast or with any paper in America except the occasional paper that still has a toehold on reality.
Fox News Channel, on the other hand, claims to have only one bias--it is definitely pro-American--and it presents all the facts and every viewpoint and leaves the decision up to the viewer. Imagine if these news stories had been written from that perspective. They would be barely recognizable--and some of them would not have been written at all.
What makes the liberal bias in the
mainstream media so pernicious is that they deny that they're biased
and insist that their twisted version of events is "reality," and
anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally or morally suspect.
In other words, they're fanatics. And, like all good fanatics, they're
utterly convinced that they're in sole possession of virtue and truth.
Nothing to add. The sure sign of a punk piece. Note the
insouciant confidence of Mr. Card in this excerpt: "I'm painting Mr.
Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately." He
is bold, fearless, and provocative. He leaves nothing in his wake but a
levelled landscape in which liberal blindness, pretension, arrogance,
and assumption poke no higher than the shoots of clover that grow in
every razed North American battlefield. So much for our rationale. What
of the reward? It may seem a paltry thing. There will be no plaques, no
ceremonies, no luncheons, no lucrative book contracts, no lissome
literateurs eager to fraternize with greatness. There is only the punk
promise: if ever Mr. Card is in trouble, trouble unto death that is, he
can smile death in the face and wait serenely for his inevitable rescue
by the Shuteye
Train. Is that reward enough? Shammadamma.
