Mine will be coming up this fall (though I’m not sure of the exact date, because my very earliest posts were lost in one of my blogging software updates).
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Massive Failure
…of the Great Society, and the taboo on discussion of race when it’s politically incorrect.
Next Stop, Space
This underwater hotel in Fiji looks pretty neat. I think that a lot of its clientele would love a room with an earth view.
One thing I see missing, though — no (obvious) curtains on the windows. I’ve heard that there have been problems with underwater hotels in the past, because the dolphins liked to voyeuristically look in the window and watch couples engaged in amorous activities.
Bam’s Glam
…is gone. Thoughts on the loss of the president’s glamour, from the glamour expert:
What happened? In 2008, after all, not just political pundits and regular folks were expecting big things of Obama. So were certified leadership gurus. Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California and Andy Zelleke of Harvard praised Obama for possessing “that magical quality known as charisma.”
This charisma, they predicted, would give Obama “the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today” because “a charismatic leader could break through the prevailing orthodoxy that the nation is permanently divided into red and blue states … and build a broader sense of community, with a compelling new vision.”
There was only one problem. Obama wasn’t charismatic. He was glamorous — powerfully, persuasively, seductively so. His glamour worked as well on Bennis and Zelleke as it did on voters.
What’s the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.
That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too. On issues such as same-sex marriage and free trade, the supporters projected their own views onto him and assumed he was just saying what other, less discerning voters wanted to hear.
Even well-informed observers couldn’t decide whether Obama was a full-blown leftist or a market-oriented centrist. “Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test,” his friend Cassandra Butts told Rolling Stone early in the campaign. “People see in him what they want to see.”
It was pretty obvious to me what he was from the get go. His faux pas with Joe the Plumber was a big tell.
[Update a while later]
Isn’t it time we grew up?
I want to underscore the fact that it is not just Barack Obama who is living in la-la land. It’s the whole apparat. The suits in Washington have ingested and then regurgitated the neo-Keynesian socialist pabulum that mesmerized elite opinion some time in the 1960s and has never let go.
But we are letting go. By “we” I mean the people who these fools and scoundrels in Washington have misled. They couldn’t help it. They don’t know any better. How cruel it is going to be when the mentally-challenged Joe Biden is exposed as the Grecian formula empty shell that he is. And Barack Obama . . . It was a good show while it lasted. If you closed your eyes and said “spread the wealth” he might have seemed, for a moment, like a serious politician. Really, as everyone sees now, he is a Gatsby-like figure who smiles and smiles but is imploding before our eyes.
On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.
It is deeply ironic that so many in the media have referred to the president as “the adult in the room.”
Homecoming
Just a few months after that December 2001 raid, The New York Times mentioned Maye, Jones and Prentiss in a front-page story about how the drug trade was wreaking havoc on the poor and rural south. That article, in contrast with my own reporting, shows how drastically a journalist’s own perspective can alter a story’s narrative. Certainly there’s no question that two families were devastated as the result of a drug raid gone wrong. But when I first came upon Maye’s story, it immediately struck me as an example of collateral damage from the drug war, not of the drug trade. One family lost a young, likable son and brother forever; another family had a young, likable son, brother and father taken from them for a decade. And the pile of bodies resulting from the policy of sending cops barreling into private homes in the middle of the night to stop people from getting high has only grown since the night Cory Maye shot Ron Jones.
I found Maye’s story while researching a paper about the overuse of SWAT teams and paramilitary search tactics. And so where the Times saw another cop killed by a drug dealer, I wondered why a guy who had no criminal record and no real drugs to speak of in his home would knowingly take on a team of raiding police officers, kill one of them, then surrender with bullets still remaining in his gun. It seemed much more like a series of mistakes resulting in a tragedy — a tragedy compounded by Maye’s subsequent conviction and death sentence.
The evil and societal damage of the drug war vastly exceeds that of the drug sellers (let alone users) and drug trade, all the more because it is well intentioned.
A Societal Sea Change
The Smurfs have thrown in the towel and given up on communism.
The Good Old Days Of Journalism
I think that if we’re going to have schools of journalism, this should be a required exercise:
Mariam, our managing editor, was previously our rock-star art director. So she resumed that role for ALL ON PAPER. Her designers mostly deserted her after they learned a terrifying reality of pre-computer layout…
You must do math.
First, there’s headline counting: A capital M is two, but a lower-case L (or is that the number 1?) is one-half. So how many counts do I have for a 48-point head across two columns?
Then there are the stories whose column inches must be distributed evenly across the page, requiring long division (without a calculator) and resulting in vaguely sexual newsroom directives like, “I need 11 inches to fill this box, and I need it now.”
Finally, there’s sizing photos with that confounded proportion wheel. Even though it’s supposed to help you shrink or enlarge a photo, and even though the instructions are printed right on the front, that God-awful wheel still doesn’t ever seem to give you the proper percentages. It’s more like a Magic 8-Ball than a round slide rule: much more mysterious than accurate.
“It’s been rough,” Mariam admits. “I’ve found myself sitting in silence, reminiscing about the days when CNTRL+Z was all it took. I miss my iMac.” But she also confesses…
Regardless of the stress or the obscene amount of paper that’s accumulated on the newsroom floor, I won’t forget what this project has given us. We’ve formed this sort of newsroom camaraderie that I hadn’t experienced before, and it means everything.
I’ve never been a professional journalist, but this is the process that we went through preparing proposals at Rockwell in the eighties. It took a long time to get the publications department to go to computers, even after the engineers were writing their proposal inputs in Wordperfect, and some had Macs with Pagemaker. We would have to print out our word processing output, and they would dutifully rekey it into their typesetting machines, because there were no compatible disk formats, which meant, of course, that we got to reedit for typos. They would cut out and wax the columns and lay them out on the boards, and then copy the gallies for us to review.
It meant that you had to have everything done about three days before it was due, because last-minute changes were just too painful to incorporate. On a thirty-day proposal, that was a lot of lost time.
There was an ugly transition period in the early nineties (a year or three before I left the company) when those responsible for actually writing the proposals rebelled and insisted on doing it themselves on Pagemaker. Pubs resisted, of course, reading the handwriting on the wall, and washing their hands of the results, though a few saw the future and came over to help (and learn what they would be doing themselves in a few years if they still had a job). Upper management had to adjudicate the situation, but the transition must have happened, because when I went back to do consulting at Boeing a decade or so later, everyone was publishing in Word, with an editor assigned to the team. But I think that it’s important for journalists using modern tools to understand the roots of their profession. If you could give them a hot-lead type machine, it would be even more educational, though probably going full Gutenberg with carved wooden blocks should be reserved for grad school. Hell, it might even teach them the difference between “font” and “typeface.”
Big-Government Morality
Thoughts from Timothy Dalrymple:
One of the great difficulties of this issue, for Christians, is that the morality of spending and debt has been so thoroughly demagogued that it’s impossible to advocate cuts in government spending without being accused of hatred for the poor and needy. A group calling itself the “Circle of Protection” recently promoted a statement on “Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor.” But we don’t need to protect the programs. We need to protect the poor. Indeed, sometimes we need to protect the poor from the programs. Too many anti-poverty programs are beneficial for the politicians that pass them, and veritable boondoggles for the government bureaucracy that administers them, but they actually serve to rob the poor of their dignity and their initiative, they undermine the family structures that help the poor build prosperous lives, and ultimately mire the poor in poverty for generations. Does anyone actually believe that the welfare state has served the poor well?
It is immoral to ignore the needs of the least of these. But it’s also immoral to ’serve’ the poor in ways that only make more people poor, and trap them in poverty longer. And it’s immoral to amass a mountain of debt that we will pass on to later generations. I even believe it’s immoral to feed the government’s spending addiction. Since our political elites have demonstrated such remarkably poor stewardship over our common resources, it would be foolish and wrong to give them more resources to waste. What we need our political leaders committed to prudence and thrift, to wise and far-sighted stewardship, and to spurring a free and thriving economy that will encourage the poor and all Americans to seize their human dignity as creatures made in the image of God, to be fruitful and take initiative and express their talents and creativity.
Fat chance of that. Not enough opportunities for graft.
Feel My Printer Fury
Everyone involved in the printer industry needs to be marched to the lip of a volcano and poked hard with tridents.
I feel his pain. I haven’t used my HP in weeks, which will neither print black and white, or scan, because it wants a new color cartridge.
Real Monopoly
Why, when the game was first released in the 1930s, did people all over the world make an almost cooperative decision to drop the auction? (A decision that is especially puzzling given that it makes for a worse game).
Well I puzzled over this for a long time until my friend Becky – who along with her husband Darrell is something of a board games geek – supplied what I’m pretty sure is the answer. We, gamers as we are, might think a game featuring lots of inter-player shafting is superior to one without. But Monopoly is, and always was, played not by gamers, but by families; and inter-player shafting is liable to cause all sorts of upset.
This is actually frustrating, because (if I remember my history correctly) the game was originally intended to help teach about capitalism and free markets. By crippling the game in this way, it makes it much more about luck, which feeds into the notion that winners must “help out” the losers, because they have no control over their fates, thus feeding into the socialist impulse. That is, to use Dick Gephardt’s unfortunate phrase of a few years back about “life’s lottery,” it encourages fatalism and wealth redistribution, instead of initiative.
In any event, even if the real thing isn’t great for family and friends, gamers at least should play it seriously.
[Via Geek Press]