Author: Brendan James

Is It Time To Retire Romeo And Juliet?

by Brendan James

Commenting on a new adaptation, Alyssa Rosenberg complains that the play “hasn’t aged well”:

[T]he vision of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a “won’t they miss me when I’m gone” pout. There’s a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony’s death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Anna Williams suggests the exploration of “deeply childish love” is the point of the play:

The play’s criticism of the lovers becomes explicit in the speeches of Friar Laurence, who considers their relationship shallow, hasty, and immoderate. Amazed at the news that Romeo has suddenly stopped loving Rosaline and fallen in love with Juliet, the friar concludes that “young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.” (Just as Rosenberg says, “Romeo’s age isn’t specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man.”) A love that lies more in the eyes than in the heart, in the friar’s analogy, is deficient.

The rapid progress of the lovers’ relationship worries the friar, too: “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast,” he cautions the eager Romeo. Although Juliet calls their love “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” the night that she meets Romeo, she does not actually slow their courtship, as they marry the very next day. We are, in Rosenberg’s phrase, watching them “behave like early teenagers.”

I agree with Alyssa that most modern-dress productions don’t come off well—I haven’t been the same since sweating through a bleak, grey staging at Edinburgh Festival a few years back. But is the play itself really “outdated?” Probably not until self-destructive love is out of our system. In the meantime it seems odd to fault Shakespeare for the relatively recent butcherings of a drama that has been staged for roughly 400 years.

A Terminal Career Path

by Brendan James

Rebecca Shuman declares that “the tenure track literature professorship is extinct,” and urges all aspiring grad students to turn back while they still can:

Other well-meaning academics have already attempted to warn you, the best-known screed in this subgenre being William Pannapacker’s “Graduate School in the Humanities? Just Don’t Go.” But this convinced no one. It certainly didn’t convince me! Why? Because Pannapacker is a tenured professor. He pulled it off, so why can’t you? After all, someone has to get these jobs.

Well, someone also has to not die from small-cell lung cancer to give the disease its 6 percent survival rate, but would you smoke four packs a day with the specific intention of being in that 6 percent? No, because that’s stupid. Well, tenure-track positions in my field have about 150 applicants each. Multiply that 0.6 percent chance of getting any given job by the 10 or so appropriate positions in the entire world, and you have about that same 6 percent chance of “success.” If you wouldn’t bet your life on such ludicrous odds, then why would you bet your livelihood?

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew answered readers on why he changed his mind on Iraq, Harry Enten found support for immigration reform at critical mass, and Pew measured escalating support for post legalization. Felix supplied a fairly grim reason to sweat the bitcoin boom, Iraq asked Obama to pass the drones, and we checked in on the Gitmo hunger strike. We also surveyed the coming inter-activist skirmishes over fracking, discovered another cholera scandal rocking the UN, and Shafer yearned for a new vocabulary for North Korea coverage.

Elsewhere, we continued to argue libertarianism vs. Christianism, questioned the efficacy of the presidential pulpit, Harry Levine described the appeal of stop-and-frisk from a cop’s perspective, and Cowen factored alcohol into the pursuit of gun control. Brian Merchant found out how much Republicans like renewable energy, we considered cutting back on the GOP’s traveling debate roadshow in 2016. Readers spoke up about the low budget weddings, disapproved of UPenn’s no-smokers policy, and doubted any connection between the tactics of the NRA and Black Panthers.

In assorted coverage, we paid respects to the late, great Roger Ebert, let readers ask Josh Fox anything, and remembered Bruce Springsteen’s intense relationship with the Big Man. We read the brochure for pot’s Nappa Valley, flagged some major Sully bait, and heard readers sound off on the limits of graphic war imagery.

Later, Oppenheimer explored the limits of his parenting skills, Richard Nieva spotlighted the share-economy and its discontents, and we considered the status of Pixar films in light of the Nemo-sequel. We met a member of the US chemical battalion in the Face of the Day, made it through the MHB bit-by-bit and took a breath in North Galiano Island, British Columbia for the VFYW.

–B.J.

Small Government Theocons? Ctd

by Brendan James

A reader writes:

Concerning this post, I think you and Ed Kilgore are talking past each other.  Ed’s talking about the Religious Right; you’re talking about “young evangelicals.”  Not exactly the same thing—indeed, the young evangelicals you’re speaking of seem to be moving away from the Right, or at least modifying it to accommodate what is now clearly a cause as lost as keeping evangelicals from divorcing.

But if you focus on, say, the Tea Party, as Ed does, it’s apparent that the persistent efforts of some clueless pundits to characterize it as a “libertarian” movement miss the point.  It’s not the deficit these people are concerned with; after all, where were they in the oughts?  They’re concerned, as ever, with the federal government taking stuff away from deserving folk like themselves and giving it to undeserving folk like the poor, or the uninsured, or parasitic elites in academia, the bureaucracy, etc.

And for them this is a moral cause; that Obama is in the business of taking from the “right” people and giving to the “wrong” ones isn’t a policy disagreement, it’s proof of his moral perfidy.  That they are utterly clueless about the federal budget and the fact that they are major beneficiaries of federal redistribution policies makes it all the easier for them to strike this self-righteous pose; there’s no “libertarianism” for them if it touches “their” Medicare.  It really is the culture war by another means.

I understand this point, that libertarianism and Christianism are not a priori incompatible (even if it requires some slippery semantics) and so a rise in the former need not lead to perestroika. But the fact is that evangelicals are the core of the religious right, and if the next generation is becoming libertarian on social matters like marriage—we could talk about drugs as well—that’s a big problem for the old guard that organizes much of the base around cultural paranoia. If this generational shift continues, how small is the Christian Right’s tent going to shrink before they lack the clout Kilgore and the rest of us are worried about?

The UN’s Deadly Incompetence, Ctd

by Brendan James

A Zimbabwean cholera patient sits in his

Not long ago we posted on the UN’s cover-up of a cholera outbreak in Haiti, sparked by a peacekeeping mission in 2010. It turns out there was another outbreak on their watch, in Zimbabwe, which left 4,000 dead in 2008-09. A whistleblower in the UN tried to warn his superiors about the growing epidemic, but was fired by his chief officer, on behalf of that officer’s friends in Mugabe’s government. It was an election year, after all. Armin Rosen digs deeper:

The UN and [officer Agostinho] Zacarias’s chief responsibility should have been to Zimbawe’s embattled civilian population. Instead, both failed to live up to their obligations — even as they were conspiring against someone who had exceeded them. That campaign even seeped into the tribunal proceedings, as Zacarias and the UN made specious and unsupported claims in court that Tadonki had been accused of sexual harassment while based in Harare. It didn’t work, but the UN’s efforts are continuing even now: the UN has stated that it is appealing its own tribunal’s decision, and according to [lawyer Robert] Amsterdam, the World Body has taken the first procedural steps necessary to retry the case. At a March 6 press conference, a UN spokesperson refused to comment on the case — except to say that “judgments of the UN Dispute Tribunal are not final until they have been confirmed by the UN Appeals Tribunal,” and that “the Organization intends to file an appeal of this judgment.”

(Photo: A Zimbabwean cholera patient sits in his bed on February 27, 2009 at a hospital in Harare. By Desmond Kwande/AFP/Getty Images)

“Collars for Dollars”

by Brendan James

Harry Levine explains the incentives in law enforcement that produce so many marijuana arrests:

Police work can be dangerous. Ordinary patrol and narcotics police like the marijuana arrests because they are relatively safe and easy. If an officer stops and searches 10 or 15 young people, one or two of them will likely have a bit of marijuana. All police have arrest quotas and often they can earn much-desired overtime pay by making a marijuana arrest toward the end of a shift. In New York City, arresting people for petty offenses for overtime pay is called “collars for dollars.” Every cop in the city knows that expression. From the officers’ point of view, people possessing marijuana are highly desirable arrestees. As one veteran lieutenant said, people whose only crime is marijuana possession are “clean,” meaning physically clean. Unlike junkies or winos, people arrested for marijuana don’t have HIV, hepatitis, or even body lice. They are unlikely to throw up on the officer or in the police car or van. Frequently they are on the way to a party or a date, and if they have smoked a little, they may be relaxed and amiable. Marijuana arrests are a quality of life issue – for the police.

By the by, here in NYC under Mayor Bloomberg, the police round up more pot smokers every year than the total number of arrests under Koch and Dinkins combined.

Iraq Wants Our Drones

by Brendan James

A couple Iraqi intelligence officers say their government asked the US for strikes against jihadis on the Syrian border. Obama declined. Micah Zenko, relieved, provides some background:

In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA had increased its covert training and support efforts to enhance Iraq’s Counterterrorism Service forces that are focused on AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] or [Syrian jihadist] al-Nusrah militants that threaten western Iraq. A senior Obama administration official stated: “This relationship is focused on supporting the Iraqis to deal with terrorist threats within their borders, and not about ramping up unilateral operations.” Training and advising another state’s security forces is a normal component of military to military cooperation, but conducting kinetic operations for them could quickly draw the United States into creating additional enemies out of what are domestic and regionally-focused terrorist groups.

The CIA already serves as the counterterrorism air force of Yemen, and, occasionally, Pakistan. It should not further expand this chore to Iraq.

Extending the drone campaign to Iraq to to combat Syrian insurgents sounds like a profoundly poor idea that, as Zenko points out, could very quickly spin out of control. Given Obama’s rejection of the Petraeus-Hillary plan to directly arm Syrian rebels and his interest in preserving his legacy on Iraq, it’s hard to imagine him touching that border as things stand.

But proof has been mounting for a while now that jihads in Iraq and Syria travel back and forth with ease, and have comingled to the point that State has labled them the same operation. The obvious snag is that we want Bashar’s regime to fold and Maliki’s to hold up. The jihadis, of course, don’t distinguish the two, and right now their success against Bashar contributes to instability in Iraq, and vice versa. It’s quite a nasty cycle, one we’ll have to break at some point soon.